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When I was in elementary and middle school in Virginia in the 1970s, we learned about the Civil War from many sources, including battlefield visits. The title of one book has stay with me, because Across Five Aprils  is a very handy mnemonic for the dates that bracket this horrible rift, from Fort Sumter to the Appomattox Court House: April 22, 1861 to April 9, 1865. In many ways, of course, the war never ended. I first learned of the war through a southern lens, but neither my teachers nor my community embraced the Lost Cause continuation of the conflict, as I later learned many thousands still do. Even where I live today, in a part of Massachusetts where nearly every town boasts a Union Street and an honor roll of those who defended the United States against its most serious (to date) insurgency, the Confederate Battle flag sometimes flies ... and more so since the 2016 ascendency of white supremacists. As odd as it is to have "traitor" flags this far north of the Mason-Dix...

Image: HOTLITTLEPOTATO for Wired magazine. From Schoolhouse Rock and whatever amount of civics classes have survived the regimes of high-stakes testing in our schools, many of us have gained the impression that in the United States, voters choose their politicians. If we have a more sophisticated understanding, we understand that the first draft of the Constitution disenfranchised most of the population, but that amendments expanded the franchise, first by race and then by sex. We might remain (rightfully) cynical about the manipulation of voters and by the insidious advantages of incumbency, but we think of the general direction of influence to be: voters --> politicians Frequent readers of this blog will know that I have written quite a lot about the pernicious effects of gerrymandering, a way of manipulating district boundaries to gain partisan advantage, so that the selection process is reversed: politicians --> voters I encourage those with curiosity and perhaps insomnia ...

Map by Neil Freeman, 2012 Click to enlarge When Neil Freeman's imaginative map of the United States was first tossed over my digital transom last week, I noticed the names of some of the larger areas. I was aware that he had divided the territory in such a way as to make them all equal in population. But I mainly noticed the names of some of the larger imagined states, such as Ogallala, and was immediately put in mind of other continent-scale efforts at regionalization , including the famous Nine Nations of North America. Although the names he applies to the map reveal a profound understanding of what geographers call sense of place, Freeman began his project with something more practical in mind: addressing a somewhat subtle aspect of voter suppression. On his presciently-named blog Fake is the New Real , he explained the iterative process by which began to define his states , and goes on to describe some of the detailed considerations. Although he insisted that the map is primari...

(With apologies to Jonathan Swift .) In a hail of bullets, students at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were thrust into the role of activists. Within hours, it became clear that they were to become the most determined, effective, and articulate public citizens we have seen in our country in a very long time. The fact that they were responding to a terror attack in our most politically benighted state made their achievements all the more remarkable. They drew attention to Senator Marco Rubio 's misplaced priorities more effectively than anybody of my generation has done, shaming him into endorsing a reduced limit on ammunition magazines. They caused the famously inflexible Gov. Rick "Skeletor" Scott to make a small concession on the question of whether someone too young to buy a Bud Light should be able to buy an assault rifle. The even convinced the president of the United States to speak out in favor of universal background checks, so that terrorist...

PRI journalist Jason Margolis reports that even with recently rising wages, the United States remains one of the world's most inequitable nations , by several measures. The report alludes to two prominent measures of income inequality -- the Gini coefficient and ratios of executive pay to that of average workers. By either measure, the United States is either in poor company or in no company at all. That is to say, a broad measure of income distribution puts the United States in the company of relatively underdeveloped countries -- certainly not any of the countries of Europe. And the stratospheric pay of CEOs compared to ordinary workers cannot be found anywhere in the world. As other studies have found, sharp inequalities are bad for public health. In countries with highly concentrated wealth, increased stress and other factors mean that even the wealthy are less healthy than they would be in more equitable societies. The problem in the United States, of course, is that "eq...

Library of Congress researcher Shameema Rahman discusses several failed efforts to count federal laws , and does not offer an estimate. Blogger Dave Kowal argues that there are "too many" and provides a rough estimate of 4,500 criminal violations , with thousands of additional laws throughout the U.S. Code. Neither writer estimates the number of state and municipal laws, but presumably they number in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Image: Puntifications In other words, many  things are illegal ( adj .) in our country -- literally more than we can count. And yet ... and yet! There is one very narrow category of legal violations that will cause the perpetrator to be known as an  illegal. As if the word were a noun. It is not rape, murder, jaywalking, tax evasion, burglary, arson, or treason. People who do these things are described by very specific nouns usually ending in -ist  or -er . But the perpetrators of these crimes are understood as distinct from the crimes thems...

Avery Island, Louisiana is very high on the list of places I have never been but to which I feel a strong connection. Since I started getting serious about chili in middle school, I have never been far from a bottle of Tabasco. One of the nice things about my three-year stint in the specialty food industry is that our packaging plant always had hundreds of thousands of tiny (1/8-ounce) bottles of the pepper-mash sauce, because we put one in every Meal, Ready-to-Eat that we packaged. When we had meetings in the office, it was often the case that every man in the room was wearing a Tabasco necktie, as we each had a small collection. I remember my boss there admonishing me when I returned from a meeting in New England and complained about the bland food. "What were you doing traveling up there without Tabasco in your pocket?" she scolded. Its Louisiana home has loomed large in my imagination for years. Even though my parents have visited -- and they did bring me some nice gifts ...