Losing the News

Serge Schmemann at NYT writes about local media It was a school, too, for readers. The candidates in local elections or speakers at school board meetings dealt with matters that made a tangible and immediate difference to readers. Official corruption was not some...

Cameras in the House

At Semafor, Kadia Goba  reports on C-SPAN: Viewers now get a broader glimpse of Congress in action. There’s an expanded view of lawmakers roaming the floor during votes, where you may see footage of Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y., running into the chamber minutes before a...

Digital Society

Nathan Gardels at Noema: In a recent Noema interview, Byung-Chul Han further noted how the structure of peer-to-peer social media is deleterious to democracy. “Information is spread without forming a public sphere,” he says. “It is produced in private spaces and...

Political Anger

Steven W. Webster, Elizabeth C. Connors, and Betsy Sinclair have written a study titled “The Social Consequences of Political Anger.”  The abstract: A functioning democracy relies on social interactions between people who disagree—including listening to...