Lessig has been an outspoken critic of the Electoral College, campaign financing, and gerrymandering, and is a frequent commentator on these issues.

In his book, Lessig proposes some solutions to these problems, including penalties on states that suppress voters, incentives to end gerrymandering, and “civic juries,” which would be a system to have representative bodies make decisions on behalf of constituents.

I don’t think there was any “golden age.” At any time we could have written a book about how institutions have produced unrepresentativeness.

With his legacy at stake, he used the rally to lash out indiscriminately at threats real and imagined. He skewered the living and the dead, deadbeat NATO countries and Democratic rivals

he made time to criticize the genteel way security guards had corralled a protester who had flashed her middle finger on her way out the door. Watching from the stage, Trump seemed disappointed that they hadn’t roughed her up more, mocking the guards for grabbing her wrist “lightly” and beseeching her to “please come.”

Another president who faced impeachment wasn’t squeamish about manhandling protesters either. White House tapes show that in 1971, Richard Nixon privately endorsed an idea to use the Teamsters to beat up anti–Vietnam War demonstrators massed in Washington.

She said the result showed that the majority of people in Scotland "want a very different future" to the rest of the UK.

Speaking in Dundee, Ms Sturgeon said the Scottish electorate had rejected Mr Johnson, the Conservative party and Brexit. They had sent a clear signal that they wanted the future of Scotland to be "in the hands of people who live here", she added.

She said the UK government "can't ultimately block the will of the Scottish people", adding that the "mandate and momentum" is on the side of another referendum.

“Boris Johnson is winning in a walk,” Joe Biden told the attendees at a fund-raiser in San Francisco on Thursday night, referring to the Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader. “Look what happens when the Labour Party moves so, so far to the left.”

Several Labour Party veterans whom I spoke with on Friday insisted that the lousy result for Labour came down to Corbyn’s political persona proving anathema to the Party’s traditional working-class base—and there are some opinion-poll data that bear this out.

for every time Brexit was raised on the doorsteps, the leadership was raised four more—even by those sticking with us. There was visceral anger from lifelong Labour voters who felt they couldn’t vote for the party they had supported all their lives because of ‘that man at the top.’ 

Before climate change occupied our collective consciousness as the biggest threat to human existence, there was nuclear apocalypse.

This entwined history of militarization and ecological threat casts a shadow over how Americans respond to today’s environmental challenges. Anthropologist Joseph Masco looks at history to understand the persistence of a national security framework for approaching ecological questions even today.

As President Ronald Reagan was escalating confrontation with the Soviets in the 1980s, scientists were leading public debates on the possibility of a “nuclear winter.” They were actively demanding nuclear arsenals be reduced for the sake of global environmental security, often at the cost of their own reputations

Enter any online forum dedicated to local politics, especially one in a rural area, and one of the hot topics is likely to be potholes and bad roads. Yet, as the environmental studies scholar Christopher W. Wells writes, when “good roads” first became a political issue, in the years after the Civil War, rural people were decidedly not the ones advocating for them.

In fact, in the early years after the Civil War, as freight and passenger railroads spread across the country, long-distance travel by road actually became less common than it had been.

The interest in “good roads” came mostly from the cities. Railroad executives wanted better rural roads to more efficiently move agricultural commodities to their stations.

How will online misinformation (“fake news”) affect America’s 2020 elections? It’s the kind of question that might send voters scurrying to the nearest stack of political science journals. But you’d be better off looking north—to Canada, and its impending federal elections, which will be held on October 21, 2019.

In part that’s because Canada has taken steps to address the potential for misinformation in this election cycle, developing what Politico recently characterized as “the most detailed plan anywhere in the Western world to combat foreign meddling in its upcoming election.” The government’s plan includes transparency guidelines for political advertising online, the establishment of a cybersecurity task force dedicated to monitoring for potential election threats, and the allocation of $7 million Canadian dollars to digital and civic literacy initiatives.

if all that fails, the country also has a non-partisan panel that’s empowered to alert the public in the event of significant foreign interference in the election.

As the media struggles to make sense of President Trump’s interest in buying Greenland, some say that his motives are transparent: Greenland possesses vast untapped natural resources.

Of course, resource wealth does not always lead to well-being. In fact, in some cases the opposite seems to be true. The idea of a “resource curse” gained momentum in the early 2000s. It proposes a correlation between resource endowment, particularly oil, and the propensity for armed conflict, corruption, and poor development outcomes.

resources provide financial incentives for rebels to continue conflict, and governments to engage in misrule, with little of a country’s resource wealth translating into public welfare. Civil wars in resource-rich African countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the post-Cold War period are examples of this dynamic.

President Trump says he is lifting sanctions on Turkey after the country agreed to what he called a permanent cease-fire in northern Syria, ending Turkey's military offensive that began after the U.S. pulled troops from the area.

"This was an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else, no other nation," he said. "We're willing to take blame and we're also willing to take credit; this is something they've been trying to do for many, many decades."

Trump abruptly announced on Oct. 6 that U.S. troops would withdraw from northern Syria. Lawmakers accused him of abandoning Kurdish forces, who were key allies in the U.S. fight against ISIS. Turkey argues that the Kurdish fighters are terrorists.

Bolivia's President Evo Morales looked set to win reelection without a runoff, declaring outright victory as he pushed back against critics who dispute the results, accusing them of trying to stage a coup.

s the counting has continued, Morales' lead has mounted.

That has led to accusations of fraud by his opponents and protests across the country, including riots in six of Bolivia's nine regions and the capital, La Paz, where police fired tear gas at demonstrators, according to The Associated Press.

Nineteenth-century European and American writers didn’t just describe African and Asian people as fat but insisted that they revered fatness. They expressed particular horror at the supposed desire of “uncivilized” men for heavy women. Many popular descriptions of African societies focused on the practice of demanding that young women eat heavily.

Forth writes that Europeans were arriving at generalizations about whole populations based on their experiences with a small elite group. If they acknowledged that common people were rarely fat, they often ascribed this to poverty and assumed that obesity was a widespread cultural ideal. For example, missionaries in India dwelled on the big-bellied god Ganesha as a transparent representation of ordinary people’s desires regarding their own body shapes.

Finck went on to write a diet book aimed at white American women, helping to popularize the association of heaviness with unacceptable savagery that continues today.

President Donald Trump has blamed his recent predecessors for the current tensions with China, but many of the dynamics in today’s trade war have been at play for centuries.

America’s relationship with the country goes back to its founding—and it has always been one centered on trade.

Nothing matched the American thirst for tea. Today, with the trade deficit recently estimated at $54 billion, Americans are still buying more from China than they’re selling. “Now, it’s Nike sneakers and iPhones,” says Haddad.

In 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that it was “the duty of all persons in the service of the United States … to give the earliest information to Congress or any proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

“the country’s treatment of whistleblowers has been a conflicted one.”

the whistleblower is labeled a traitor by those in power,

Peaceful marches, a general strike and violent unrest have convulsed Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, this week after a group of Catalan leaders received long prison sentences.

Critics of the independence drive often point to Spain's 1978 constitution, which says Spain is "indivisible" but it gives Catalonia some administrative and legal powers as an "autonomous community."

These momentous events were a painful chapter for many Spaniards who reject Catalonia's claim to sovereign statehood, but also for the many Catalans who watched Spanish authorities aggressively block voters, arrest the referendum organizers and ultimately take full control of the regional government.