were expressing frustration with a system of democratic representation that they felt was not furthering their interests.

Years after the fires, the network remains, helping community members find new apartments and jobs,

My biggest fear is not that mistrust makes us disengage, but that we fail to imagine change at the scale we truly need.

But “people don’t experience life in an issue-specific way,”

As long as less populated states lean the same way politically, those states can sway elections if the size of the House of Representatives is small. Increase the House size, and the effect goes away. This idea, called the House Size Effect, suggests that American elections are a function not only of popular will but also of the size of the House

Institutions maintain their resilience by being flexible and capable of change. With age, though, they calcify and become brittle. The danger is that institutions that once bent to accommodate insurrectionism in their youth may snap under similar pressure in their old age.

If thick voice-based activism can add a potent layer of humanity to abstract policy issues, thin voice-based activism runs the risk of “slacktivism,” the critique that writer Evgeny Morozov and others have offered about activism that’s more about virtue signaling and unconsidered participation than about making change.

At its best, citizen monitoring leverages knowledge that citizens already have about an issue, encourages them to learn about the deeper causes, and proposes original solutions.

Our contemporary political and media environment is designed to activate fear.