Book edited by Michael Lewis: “The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.
Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers, including Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell, to join him in finding someone doing an interesting job for the government and writing about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.
Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these public servants are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. Expanding on the Washington Post series, the vivid profiles in Who Is Government? blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters…(More)”.
What Happens When AI-Generated Lies Are More Compelling than the Truth?
Essay by Nicholas Carr: “…In George Orwell’s 1984, the functionaries in Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth spend their days rewriting historical records, discarding inconvenient old facts and making up new ones. When the truth gets hazy, tyrants get to define what’s true. The irony here is sharp. Artificial intelligence, perhaps humanity’s greatest monument to logical thinking, may trigger a revolution in perception that overthrows the shared values of reason and rationality we inherited from the Enlightenment.
In 1957, a Russian scientist-turned-folklorist named Yuri Mirolyubov published a translation of an ancient manuscript—a thousand years old, he estimated—in a Russian-language newspaper in San Francisco. Mirolyubov’s Book of Veles told stirring stories of the god Veles, a prominent deity in pre-Christian Slavic mythology. A shapeshifter, magician, and trickster, Veles would visit the mortal world in the form of a bear, sowing mischief wherever he went.
Mirolyubov claimed that the manuscript, written on thin wooden boards bound with leather straps, had been discovered by a Russian soldier in a bombed-out Ukrainian castle in 1919. The soldier had photographed the boards and given the pictures to Mirolyubov, who translated the work into modern Russian. Mirolyubov illustrated his published translation with one of the photographs, though the original boards, he said, had disappeared mysteriously during the Second World War. Though historians and linguists soon dismissed the folklorist’s Book of Veles as a hoax, its renown spread. Today, it’s revered as a holy text by certain neo-pagan and Slavic nationalist cults.
Mythmaking, more than truth seeking, is what seems likely to define the future of media and of the public square.
Myths are works of art. They provide a way of understanding the world that appeals not to reason but to emotion, not to the conscious mind but to the subconscious one. What is most pleasing to our sensibilities—what is most beautiful to us—is what feels most genuine, most worthy of belief. History and psychology both suggest that, in politics as in art, generative AI will succeed in fulfilling the highest aspiration of its creators: to make the virtual feel more authentic than the real…(More)”
How Media Ownership Matters
Book by Rodney Benson, Mattias Hessérus, Timothy Neff, and Julie Sedel: “Does it matter who owns and funds the media? As journalists and management consultants set off in search of new business models, there’s a pressing need to understand anew the economic underpinnings of journalism and its role in democratic societies.
How Media Ownership Matters provides a fresh approach to understanding news media power, moving beyond the typical emphasis on market concentration or media moguls. Through a comparative analysis of the US, Sweden, and France, as well as interviews of news executives and editors and an original collection of industry data, this book maps and analyzes four ownership models: market, private, civil society, and public. Highlighting the effects of organizational logics, funding, and target audiences on the content of news, the authors identify both the strengths and weaknesses various forms of ownership have in facilitating journalism that meets the democratic ideals of reasoned, critical, and inclusive public debate. Ultimately, How Media Ownership Matters provides a roadmap to understanding how variable forms of ownership are shaping the future of journalism and democracy…(More)”.
Accounting for State Capacity
Essay by Kevin Hawickhorst: “The debates over the Department of Government Efficiency have revealed, if nothing else, that the federal budget is obscure even to the political combatants ostensibly responsible for developing and overseeing it. In the executive branch, Elon Musk highlights that billions of dollars of payments are processed by the Treasury without even a memo line. Meanwhile, in Congress, Republican politicians highlight the incompleteness of the bureaucracy’s spending records, while Democrats bemoan the Trump administration’s dissimulation in ceasing to share budgetary guidance documents. The camp followers of these obscure programs are thousands of federal contractors, pursuing vague goals with indefinite timelines. As soon as the ink on a bill is dry, it seems, Congress loses sight of its initiatives until their eventual success or their all-too-frequent failure.
Contrast this with the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration provided Congress with hundreds of pages of spending reports every ten days, outlining how tax dollars were being put to use in minute detail. The speed and thoroughness with which these reports were produced is hard to fathom, and yet the administration was actually holding its best information back. FDR’s Treasury had itemized information on hundreds of thousands of projects, down to the individual checks that were written. Incredibly, politicians had better dashboards in the era of punch cards than we have in the era of AI. The decline in government competence runs deeper than our inability to match the speed and economy of New Deal construction: even their accounting was better. What happened?
Political scientists discuss the decline in government competence in terms of “state capacity,” which describes a government’s ability to achieve the goals it pursues. Most political scientists agree that the United States not only suffers from degraded state capacity in absolute terms, but has less state capacity today than in the early twentieth century. A popular theory for this decline blames the excessive proceduralism of the U.S. government: the “cascade of rigidity” or the “procedure fetish.”
But reformers need more than complaints. To rebuild state capacity, reformers need an affirmative vision of what good procedure should look like and, in order to enact it, knowledge of how government procedure is changed. The history of government budgeting and accounting reform illustrates both. There were three major eras of reform to federal accounting in the twentieth century: New Deal reforms of the 1930s, conservative reforms of the 1940s and 1950s, and liberal reforms of the 1960s. This history tells the story of how accounting reforms first built up American state capacity and how later reforms contributed to its gradual decline. These reforms thus offer lessons on rebuilding state capacity today…(More)”.
The New Control Society
Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.
The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette.
And it isn’t just paintings that are converging, Murrell argues. Car designs look more like each other than ever. Color is disappearing as most cars become white, gray, or black. From Sydney to Riyadh to Cleveland, an upscale coffee shop is more likely than ever to bear the same design features: reclaimed wood, hanging Edison bulbs, marble countertops. So is an Airbnb. Even celebrities increasingly look the same, with the rising ubiquity of “Instagram face” driven by cosmetic injectables and Photoshop touch-ups.
Murrell focuses on design, but the same trend holds elsewhere: Kirk Goldsberry, a basketball statistician, has shown that the top two hundred shot locations in the NBA today, which twenty years ago formed a wide array of the court, now form a narrow ring at the three-point line, with a dense cluster near the hoop. The less said about the sameness of pop melodies or Hollywood movies, the better.
As we approach the moment when all information everywhere from all time is available to everyone at once, what we find is not new artistic energy, not explosive diversity, but stifling sameness. Everything is converging — and it’s happening even as the power of the old monopolies and centralized tastemakers is broken up.
Are the powerful platforms now in charge? Or are the forces at work today something even bigger?..(More)”.
The Meanings of Voting for Citizens: A Scientific Challenge, a Portrait, and Implications
Book by Carolina Plescia: “On election day, citizens typically place a mark beside a party or candidate on a ballot paper. The right to cast this mark has been a historic conquest and today, voting is among the most frequent political acts citizens perform. But what does that mark mean to them? This book explores the diverse conceptualizations of voting among citizens in 13 countries across Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. This book presents empirical evidence based on nearly a million words about voting from over 25,000 people through an open-ended survey and both qualitative and quantitative methods. The book’s innovative approach includes conceptual, theoretical, and empirical advancements and provides a comprehensive understanding of what voting means to citizens and how these meanings influence political engagement. This book challenges assumptions about universal views on democracy and reveals how meanings of voting vary among individuals and across both liberal democracies and electoral autocracies. The book also examines the implications of these meanings for political behaviour and election reforms. The Meanings of Voting for Citizens is a critical reference for scholars of public opinion, behaviour, and democratization, as well as a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative political behaviour, empirical methods, and survey research. Practitioners working on election reforms will find it particularly relevant via its insights into how citizens’ meanings of voting impact the effectiveness of electoral reforms…(More)”.
Understanding and Addressing Misinformation About Science
Report by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Our current information ecosystem makes it easier for misinformation about science to spread and harder for people to figure out what is scientifically accurate. Proactive solutions are needed to address misinformation about science, an issue of public concern given its potential to cause harm at individual, community, and societal levels. Improving access to high-quality scientific information can fill information voids that exist for topics of interest to people, reducing the likelihood of exposure to and uptake of misinformation about science. Misinformation is commonly perceived as a matter of bad actors maliciously misleading the public, but misinformation about science arises both intentionally and inadvertently and from a wide range of sources…(More)”.
Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism
Article by Frank Langfitt: “A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.
In the benchmark survey, known as Bright Line Watch, U.S.-based professors rate the performance of American democracy on a scale from zero (complete dictatorship) to 100 (perfect democracy). After President Trump’s election in November, scholars gave American democracy a rating of 67. Several weeks into Trump’s second term, that figure plummeted to 55.
“That’s a precipitous drop,” says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. “There’s certainly consensus: We’re moving in the wrong direction.”…Not all political scientists view Trump with alarm, but many like Carey who focus on democracy and authoritarianism are deeply troubled by Trump’s attempts to expand executive power over his first several months in office.
“We’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. “It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.”…Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton sociologist who has spent years tracking Hungary, is also deeply concerned: “We are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism.”
When these scholars use the term “authoritarianism,” they aren’t talking about a system like China’s, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. Instead, they are referring to something called “competitive authoritarianism,” the kind scholars say they see in countries such as Hungary and Turkey.
In a competitive authoritarian system, a leader comes to power democratically and then erodes the system of checks and balances. Typically, the executive fills the civil service and key appointments — including the prosecutor’s office and judiciary — with loyalists. He or she then attacks the media, universities and nongovernmental organizations to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party’s favor…(More)”.
Who Owns Science?
Article by Lisa Margonelli: “Only a few months into 2025, the scientific enterprise is reeling from a series of shocks—mass firings of the scientific workforce across federal agencies, cuts to federal research budgets, threats to indirect costs for university research, proposals to tax endowments, termination of federal science advisory committees, and research funds to prominent universities held hostage over political conditions. Amid all this, the public has not shown much outrage at—or even interest in—the dismantling of the national research project that they’ve been bankrolling for the past 75 years.
Some evidence of a disconnect from the scientific establishment was visible in confirmation hearings of administration appointees. During his Senate nomination hearing to head the department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised a reorientation of research from infectious disease toward chronic conditions, along with “radical transparency” to rebuild trust in science. While his fans applauded, he insisted that he was not anti-vaccine, declaring, “I am pro-safety.”
But lack of public reaction to funding cuts need not be pinned on distrust of science; it could simply be that few citizens see the $200-billion-per-year, envy-of-the-world scientific enterprise as their own. On March 15, Alabama meteorologist James Spann took to Facebook to narrate the approach of 16 tornadoes in the state, taking note that people didn’t seem to care about the president’s threat to close the National Weather Service. “People say, ‘Well, if they shut it down, I’ll just use my app,’” Spann told Inside Climate News. “Well, where do you think the information on your app comes from? It comes from computer model output that’s run by the National Weather Service.” The public has paid for those models for generations, but only a die-hard weather nerd can find the acronyms for the weather models that signal that investment on these apps…(More)”.
Democratic Resilience: Moving from Theoretical Frameworks to a Practical Measurement Agenda
Paper by Nicholas Biddle, Alexander Fischer, Simon D. Angus, Selen Ercan, Max Grömping, andMatthew Gray: “Global indices and media narratives indicate a decline in democratic institutions, values, and practices. Simultaneously, democratic innovators are experimenting with new ways to strengthen democracy at local and national levels. These both suggest democracies are not static; they evolve as society, technology and the environment change.
This paper examines democracy as a resilient system, emphasizing the role of applied analysis in shaping effective policy and programs, particularly in Australia. Grounded in adaptive processes, democratic resilience is the capacity of a democracy to identify problems, and collectively respond to changing conditions, balancing institutional stability with transformative. It outlines the ambition of a national network of scholars, civil society leaders, and policymakers to equip democratic innovators with practical insights and foresight underpinning new ideas. These insights are essential for strengthening both public institutions, public narratives and community programs.
We review current literature on resilient democracies and highlight a critical gap: current measurement efforts focus heavily on composite indices—especially trust—while neglecting dynamic flows and causal drivers. They focus on the descriptive features and identify weaknesses, they do not focus on the diagnostics or evidence to what strengths democracies. This is reflected in the lack of cross-sector networked, living evidence systems to track what works and why across the intersecting dynamics of democratic practices. To address this, we propose a practical agenda centred on three core strengthening flows of democratic resilience: trusted institutions, credible information, and social inclusion.
The paper reviews six key data sources and several analytic methods for continuously monitoring democratic institutions, diagnosing causal drivers, and building an adaptive evidence system to inform innovation and reform. By integrating resilience frameworks and policy analysis, we demonstrate how real-time monitoring and analysis can enable innovation, experimentation and cross-sector ingenuity.
This article presents a practical research agenda connecting a national network of scholars and civil society leaders. We suggest this agenda be problem-driven, facilitated by participatory approaches to asking and prioritising the questions that matter most. We propose a connected approach to collectively posing key questions that matter most, expanding data sources, and fostering applied ideation between communities, civil society, government, and academia—ensuring democracy remains resilient in an evolving global and national context…(More)”.