A sensible, convincing program to expand voting rights and democratic virtues.
A rousing call for Gens Z and Alpha to leverage technology and save democracy.
“We are in the middle of a five-alarm fire, and mobile voting is the only scalable way to solve the primary turnout problem and put the fire out.” So writes Tusk, who had a variety of political jobs in the last few years, including a stint with fallen Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, convicted of multiple felonies, who had his 14-year sentence commuted by Donald Trump. Blagojevich, Tusk comments, had "the shockingly crazy and shockingly honest" opinion that his job was “winning elections, not actually being governor.” That leads Tusk to a hard political truth: the only time you matter to a politician is if you can help them win an election. So, he concludes, “the path to a better system is not about personalities, but about incentives....Hold [politicians] accountable for actual progress and actual results. And if they don’t deliver, you’ll throw them out.” Tusk's manifesto is far broader than its title suggests—he proposes term limits to combat political complacency—but the phone-voting piece is important. He has developed a secure voting system that gathers votes by means of encrypted cell messaging and tabulates them in clean rooms not connected to the internet, enhancing security. The system has obvious virtues, not least of them that virtually everyone has a cell phone, while not everyone (Native people on remote reservations, elderly shut-ins, military personnel outside the country, and so forth) can get to the polls. Couple this ease of technology with the fact that by 2028 the combined members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha will number 131 million, “the largest group of eligible voters in the country,” and Tusk sees them as inclined to the left. Small wonder that Republican legislators fear Tusk’s call—and good reason for progressive activists to take it up.
A sensible, convincing program to expand voting rights and democratic virtues.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781464221101
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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