Terry Moore’s TED Talk…

In mathematics, the letter “x” represents the unknown variable. It is also, arguably, one of the most popular letters in the pack. We see it everywhere: Generation X, the X-Files, and our favorite, TEDx.

So why does “x” represent the unknown?

A few years ago, Terry tells us, he decided to begin learning Arabic. He found it to be a language that was extremely precise and chock-full of information. Learning the language, and even speaking it, is similar to crafting a mathematical equation. Perhaps this is why everything we know as science, engineering, and mathematics has its derivations in the Arabic language system, most notably, algebra.

When Arabic texts made their way to Spain in the 11th century, Europe wanted to translate this mathematical wisdom of the East into a written, Western language. Attempts to do so, however, proved to be problematic. As it turned out, Arabic sounds do not translate well into European patterns of speech, nor are there ample characters to represent these sounds.

An Arabic word meaning “the unknown thing,” a word used throughout early mathematical proofs, contained the Arabic letter “sheen.” The problem was, Moore explains, there was no “sh” sound in the Spanish language. So, the language crafters borrowed the “ka” sound from the Greek letter Χ or “chi.” Later, chi was replaced with the Latin X. And once the material was translated into Latin, it formed material for math textbooks that we continue to read today.

So why is the letter “x” the unknown?

Because you can’t say “sh” in Spanish!

Ralph Nader writes:

Senator Bernie Sanders has come a long way without other people’s advice. The progressive lone ranger is now leading in the polls nationally as the preferred candidate to defeat Donald Trump—ahead of Hillary in that matchup.

Now, however, Bernie Sanders is facing the verdict of closed primaries in many states which bar independent voters from voting for any of the Democratic or Republican candidates. Pointedly, Senator Sanders won only one of the five states with primaries on April 26, 2016: Rhode Island. Why? Because that state has an open primary allowing independent voters, heavily pro-Sanders, to carry him to victory.

Had the other closed primary states—Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and earlier New York—held open primaries, he would likely have defeated Hillary Clinton as Obama defeated Hillary in 2008. Sanders would also have the possibility of changing the minds of many permanent superdelegates.

Chalk up another blockage of the people’s will to the state laws obstructing the rights of voters and insurgent candidates. Twenty states have open primaries, presumably to increase voter choice and turnout, and to justify having taxpayers pay for the primaries of private political parties.

Now, Bernie Sanders has some agonizing choices to make as a trustee for millions of voters, especially young voters, who rallied to his and their agenda…Keep Reading

Learn more about Break Free…

And where Civil Disobedience began…

Oliver Burkeman, writing in Why thinking like a computer scientist can help with big decisions for The Guardian suggests that we practice computational kindness:

When making a plan with a friend, it feels polite to say you’re flexible about when to meet, or that you don’t mind at which restaurant. But refusing to state your wishes imposes a computational cost on the other person: now he or she must make the choice (while guessing at your preferences). For humans, as for computers, deciding makes demands on limited processing power. Don’t overtax yours, and don’t force your friends to use theirs on your behalf.

I come across this all the time. Over time I’ve learned to make a suggestion, any suggestion and then allow the person to agree or not. Seldom do I care, but I’ve learned that putting my suggestion out there allows the other person a certain level of freedom. I think the effect is similar to flipping a coin and realizing that while the coin is spinning, you’re hoping for a certain outcome, the one you really wanted all along.

Happy spinning.

This is some righteous bull shit…

On Thursday I commented on Oliver Burkeman’s examination of Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, and clearly the topic is so dear to Oliver’s (and my own) heart that he decided to revisit the book, focusing on the common coffee thread among artists.

‘Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled above the rim,” writes one biographer of Søren Kierkegaard. “Next came the incredibly strong black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.” The Danish philosopher was overdoing it: perhaps it’s no coincidence that his books include Fear And Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. But coffee addicts, myself included, relish anecdotes such as this because they reinforce our belief that coffee and creativity are linked. It’s not merely that caffeine is the “acceptable addiction”, as it’s sometimes called; it’s something actively to boast about: “Oh, you don’t want to meet me before my morning coffee,” we say, with something close to pride. Try replacing “coffee” in that sentence with “heroin”. The effect isn’t quite the same.

Burkeman, however, is disturbed by the news from Maria Konnikova in her piece How Caffeine Can Cramp Creativity for The New Yorker. Burkeman continues

:The argument… runs like this. In neurochemical terms, caffeine doesn’t “give” you energy; really, it just delays the point at which you feel tired. The resulting mind-state is one of narrow focus and “hyper-vigilance”: great for ploughing through predetermined tasks, but poor for the insightful forging of connections between disparate ideas.

“Creative insights and imaginative solutions often occur when we stop working on a particular problem and let our mind move on to something unrelated,” Konnikova writes. Focus, caffeine-induced or not, isn’t enough. We need the mind-wandering, too.

But must we really cut back on coffee to get it?

This is where Burkeman reaches back for Currey we he:

found the Kierkegaard story, one of numerous accounts of spectacularly creative yet coffee-enslaved souls. (Beethoven, Sartre and Mahler were all addicts; Honoré de Balzac crushed coffee beans and ate the powder, though to be fair he also keeled over and died at 51.) One thing these tales illustrate is that it’s only partly about the caffeine. My coffee ritual (which involves a burr grinder and a cafetiere) is deeply comforting, even meditative.

Also, it slides me into the working day before my procrastinatory urges can kick in: grind beans, brew coffee, plunge, pour, sip, open laptop… and I’m working before I’ve had a chance to protest.

Me too.

Previously…

Year ago I knew a woman addicted to self-help books. She read them like an a crack head lighting her pipe. She lived (and maybe still lives) her life in search of the perfect solution, Christ’s cup, Excalibur. I’m that way with productivity porn, but I’ve come, in recent years to see my addiction for what it is: a distraction to put off doing the fucking work, so I do my best to moderate and cope. I mostly succeed.

My guilty pleasure of late has been Oliver Burkeman’s columns in The Guardian. I’ve commented on them before and I’ll do so in the future. I’m not seeking oblivion here, just the occasional buzz, get off my back why don’t you!

I like Burkeman best when he talks about writing. He writes. I write. He makes lots of money. I, well, never mind that. We have a lot in common Olly and I. This afternoon I’m reading Rise and shine: the daily routines of history’s most creative minds . Here’s the bit I liked best:

Two big insights have emerged. One is how ill-suited the nine-to-five routine is to most desk-based jobs involving mental focus; it turns out I get far more done when I start earlier, end a little later, and don’t even pretend to do brain work for several hours in the middle. The other is the importance of momentum. When I get straight down to something really important early in the morning, before checking email, before interruptions from others, it beneficially alters the feel of the whole day: once interruptions do arise, they’re never quite so problematic.

Interruptions in the morning aren’t less, they’re simply fewer. Once the household awakes, they never end. That is why the hours before dawn are so precious.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

WOULD YOU TAKE A WAL-JOB FOR $149,000…? Forbes contributor Panos Mourdoukoutas, writing in Who Earns $149,000 In Walmart? answers the question: techies. Walmart has a reputation for paying very little money to its low-skill floor… Keep reading…

IS DOUG MCMILLON WORTH $19.8 MILLION…? The short answer is, of course, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon is worth exactly what the (newly reshuffled) board says he is worth. Still, you think they might be aware of how the peasants (sometimes known as… Keep reading…

WALMART’S 21ST CENTURY LINK TO SLAVERY… Yes, I know, Walmart is not the only bad actor in this story. The headline on Jane Reed’s story—Wal-Mart, Sysco And Fancy Feasts May Be Getting Their Products From Slaves clearly tells the reader that the… Keep reading…

FROM THE OFFICE CREW COMES SUPERSTORE… I haven’t watched Superstore yet, no television and all that, but I’ll order the DVD from the library when copies are available. This was my favorite bit from Brian Moylan review in Superstore: Walmart-… Keep reading…

FRANK SWANSON BACK AT NOT-WALMART WORK… So, the cashier Frank Swanson started a new job at one of Walmart’s competitors. In today’s litigious society, mega corporations like Walmart have to have meticulous, lawyer-approved, rules… Keep reading…

WALMART PAYS UNIVERSITY NEARLY $2 MILLION… This story has a strange vibe. The headline from Arkansas Business declares: Wal-Mart Reveals $1.9M Paid to UA in FY 2015 and adds the note that while the University expects future payments of… Keep reading…

BLAH, BLAH, NEW WALMART, BLAH, BLAH, NO…! Yeah, that’s how I feel after writing about Walmart, and protests by local residents when the Bentonvile Behemoth threatens to come to town, for more than a decade. The Writing On The Wal/No Cleveland… Keep reading…

WALMART AND WILD OATS PARTING WAYS… Organic food first appeared on our radar back in October of 2006. Since then, more than 50 stories have come under the organics category. Walmart has always seemed like an unlikely place to buy organic… Keep reading…

It’s been going on for years now. Public decisions privately made.

It’s so ordinary that it seems natural.

Private interests create the public agenda. For private advantage. Insuring it’s paid for with mostly public dollars. Making sure the dollars weigh most heavily upon common people. Regressive taxes are favorites. Meaning ordinary people pay greater shares of the cost. Much greater.

A city under the thumb. Cleveland as long as I’ve known it.

Those who make these choices aren’t censured or punished. They’re applauded. And give themselves raises.

The only source that has the resources to reveal it is the Plain Dealer.

But it’s not into ruffling power. With few exceptions the paper’s leaders are treading water.

So we have Mayor Frank Jackson in his state of the city speech talking about how “all” should share in city’s prosperity. What nonsense.

He hasn’t been in a sharing mood for 10 years.

He said that “Cleveland success cannot be measured in construction projects, restaurants in destination neighborhood or political conventions.” Is he mad? That’s all it is measured by.

But, he says, it’s measured in citizens sharing prosperity. Then Jackson pitched for a renewal of a school tax and an increase in the very regressive payroll tax. It’s not amusing. Sharing in the burden only.

County Executive Armond Budish followed with a state of the county speech with the same theme: “The prosperity of the county must be shared by all of us.” Really?

Is this now the favorite song here?

He announced a $12 million private charity input for pre-kindergarten Continue Reading »

Who decides what is a portion? Ultimately, we do, but most of us don’t stop to consider the question: we think a portion is whatever the amount of food in the box or can or bag we’re about to eat is. A small bag of potato chips is not a serving. A can of pop is not a serving. A can of soup is not a serving.

Soup is a good example. We keep cans of soup in the room where I tutor because teenagers get hungry. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the cans of soup had gotten bigger (the label had a message proclaiming the fact) and that instead of containing 2.5 servings (who thought of that crazy idea?) the can now contained three servings. Three servings! I can guarantee that none of the students paid the least big of attention to the label. If they noticed the can was bigger they only thought: mmmm, more food!

This is a problem. Gizzi Erskine, writing in Our gigantic problem with portions: why are we all eating too much? for the guardian, expalins:

Our problem with portions is partly this: no one likes the concept of “less”. We are conditioned from childhood onwards to yearn for the overflowing glass and the laden table. An easy way to address this at home is simply to use smaller tableware. Often at the end of a meal, I am not really hungry but yearn for something sweet. I find that if I get a tiny dipping bowl and pile it high with whatever I desire—dense chocolate brownies, sticky halva—I feel satisfied, even with a tiny portion. When I first tried this, it felt silly. Could I really be fooled by a plate? Yes. I could. And so could you.

I know I eat best when I measure what I eat. When I dropped 80 pounds, in addition to weighing all my food to the gram, I bought three Zen bowls to eat from. The largest bowl is small and the smallest bowl is tiny, yet I never felt like I need more food after sitting down to eat the meal I had prepare for myself when I use those bowls.

Getting back to those soups, I just did a bit of maths in my head: if one can of soup contains 2.5 servings, then two cans ought to suffice for a workweek’s worth of lunches. If instead I eat a can per lunch, then I’ve eaten two-and-half’s worth of food in a single week. I’m going to try an experiment this afternoon and prepare two cans of soup and then measure them out into five equal portions to see what that week’s worth of food actually looks like.

Full disclosure, my comments on the Guardian were moderated for a very long time (more than two years I think) because I missed the rule that said linking back to Have Coffee Will Write in any comment I left was forbidden. Setting my personal experience aside, I feel for the Guardian’s Editor-In-Chief Katharine Viner. She has courageously tackled the Gordian knot of the Internet: what do you do about the trolls?

In her piece this morning, How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation?, Viner carefully lays out the intricacies of the challenge, but at the end of this paragraph she refers to the newspaper’s own research as to just who the trolls are after:

The editor of the Web We Want, Becky Gardiner, and Mahana Mansfield, the Guardian’s senior data scientist, examined the 70m comments left on the Guardian since 1999, particularly those comments blocked by our moderators for abuse or derailing the conversation, and reported on what they found. The stark results offer proof of what many have long suspected: of the 10 regular writers whose articles have had the most comments blocked, eight are women (four white and four non-white, one Muslim and one Jewish) and two are black men. Three of the 10 most abused writers are gay [Emphasis mine, JH]

Viner wants to describe the comments section as a public space, but the comparison fails because a public space should look like this, not this. As long as the default setting is anonymity, the problem will persist.

Here’s my suggestion (and I recognize that for an organization that receives comments in the millions this will be difficult): only allow verified members to leave a comment and tag each comment with their real name and the name of their city, e.g. Jeff Hess, Cleveland, Ohio. In the rare instance when anonymity is justified, a moderator can make that decision.

That may impose an unfair burden on a tiny part of he commenting universe, but I think that burden is far outweighed by the benefit of demanding that people stand behind what they write.

Ralph Nader writes:

Ever wonder why Presidential and Congressional election campaigns fail to meaningfully connect with civil society? Candidate rhetoric is designed to attract voters and campaign contributions. Candidates go out of their way to ingratiate themselves to their corporate paymasters, whose monetized minds want nothing to do with the civil society. Civil society leaders at the national and local levels and their nonprofit citizen groups form the bedrock of democracy. These civic leaders have significant expertise and experience and are meticulous and precise in their written and oral presentations. They do not traffic in false statements that are unfortunately routine for many candidates for federal office. And unlike most major party candidates who receive round-the-clock coverage for every campaign utterance, the civic stalwarts are too often left on the sidelines by the media during the campaign season.

For example, check out the Sunday morning network shows. It’s all about the horserace, the money raised, the tactics and the gaffes or outrageous slanders. Such “content” is the grist for the commercial media’s ratings and profits, especially in the 2016 presidential year. The head of CBS, Leslie Moonves said, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

So, Moonves (and all the other corporatists running major news organizations) are fine with wrecking Civil Society as long as they can engorge their portfolios.

Nader offers some hope:

Well, the civil society is fighting back with four full days (May 23, 24, 25, 26, 2016) at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. with a civic mobilization designed to break through the power of the corporate/political complex.

Breaking through power means securing long-overdue democratic solutions made possible by a new muscular civic nexus connecting local communities and Washington, D.C.

On these four days, speakers will present innovative ideas and strategies designed to take existing civic groups to higher levels of effectiveness.

This may be the best opportunity to take back our country from the billionaire class since 1968.

Revitalizing the people to assert their sovereignty under our Constitution is critical to the kind of government, economy, environment and culture that will fulfill human potential and respect posterity.

The participating citizens will be asked to support the creation of several new organizations. One will be a Secretariat to facilitate action to stop illegal wars and their quagmires (e.g. the wars on Iraq and Libya and their brutal aftermaths) by retired military, national security and diplomatic officials who have great credibility for waging peace and also significant influence, if organized, for the media and the Congress.

These Americans did speak up in unprecedented numbers in 2002-2003 against the Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq but had no infrastructure to increase their numbers and reach to the American people and the cowardly politicians in Congress.

It is also vital to return today’s circuses of elections marinated in commercial interest and cash back to deliberative events that invite the best of our people to run for elective office with its public trust.

If the foregoing whets your civic appetites, go to our website to see how you can obtain tickets for these four days of events at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. or participate in other ways.

We can make it happen; you can make it historic!

To steal a phrase, yes we can.

Good news: Harriet Tubman will be on the new $20 bill; bad news, Andrew Jackson will continue to be on the back of the bill. Good news, a group of women representing the suffrage movement (full disclosure, my grandmother was a suffragette) will be on the $10 bill; bad news, they will be on the feckin’ back of the bill while Alexander Hamilton will continue on the front because of the hit Broadway musical Hamilton

Jana Kasperkevic, writing in Harriet Tubman will appear on $20 bill, leaving Alexander Hamilton on $10 for The Guradian, reports:

Harriet Tubman, the anti-slavery campaigner, is set to appear on the front of the $20 bill, becoming the first woman to be the face of a bill of US currency.

The US Treasury Department announced the news on Wednesday after a long, public and sometimes heated consultation period. The Treasury had reportedly considered letting Tubman bump founding father Alexander Hamilton, who has been on the $10 bill since 1928. Instead, she will take Andrew Jackson’s spot on the $20 bill.

“When I announced last June that a newly redesigned $10 note would feature a woman, I hoped to encourage a national conversation about women in our democracy. The response has been powerful,” US Treasury secretary Jack Lew said in a statement. “The decision to put Harriet Tubman on the new $20 was driven by thousands of responses we received from Americans young and old.”

Kasperkevic, however, leaves out the bit that the bill may not appear before 2030. Given the current arc of digitization, who will even know what paper money is in 2030? I expect that the only people who will know what a $20 bill is by then will be drug dealers and other criminals.

Is that any way to honor any woman, let alone a courageous woman like Harriet Tubman?

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap from China. On The Writing On The Wal—the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar—I continue my singular work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

IS AMAZON’S LEAD TOO GREAT FOR WALMART…? Yesterday I noted that in a list of reasons why Walmart’s revenues didn’t climb in 2015, Amazon is mentioned in 40 percent of the reasons. That’s no coincidence. Amazon is the single greatest threat in… Keep reading…

AS LONG AS I DON’T HAVE TO GO INSIDE…? So, this morning two headlines caught my eye. The first, from Convenience Store News reads Walmart Pickup Service Expands to 30-City Footprint. The second, from Reuters tell us that Exclusive: Walmarts… Keep reading…

FRANK SWANSON ISN’T GOING AWAY… Remember Frank Swanson? Walmart shoppers in West Plains, Missouri do. Swanson was a cashier who, days away from celebrating his 20th anniversary working under The Golden Asshole got what you’d expect from… Keep reading…

GIVE WALMART A GOOD CROTCH PUNCH…? So, we all get that there are people, lots of people, who think that the Bentonvile Behemoth is not a good actor in the world economy, but I can’t remember the last time I came across such a visceral reaction as… Keep reading…

WHAT $1,000 GETS WALMART… The headline on a story this morning informs us that Wal-Mart Donates $1,000 To Local Charities, Through Community Foundation Of The Lake. Good on you Walmart, you get a tax write off and good press for your… Keep reading…

HILLARY’S WALMART PROBLEM GETS BIGGER… Two mentions of a presidential candidate endorsement crossed my desk this morning that, while I sure she is glad to have the nod, Hillary most likely wishes the leg-up stayed under the radar. The first… Keep reading…

IS THEIR PROFIT IN CURBSIDE SERVICE…? Back on Friday I considered the rationals behind Walmart’s expansion to curbside and pickup services for customers who shop on line. Fortune contributor Neil Stern, writing in For CVS And Walmart, Curbside… Keep reading…

Jeff Appelbaum, a lawyer and principal for Cuyahoga County on the new county-owned Hilton Hotel, strongly disputes the figures used by me to calculate the cost of restaurant/bar facilities at the new hotel. I totaled figures at $11 million.

He diminishes the cost outlines he provided me by substantial numbers.

I can see his complaint and want to use his entire response and follow with the documents I was sent. I think a good part his remarks are valid. The figures provided, however, mislead me because I asked for figures for restaurant and bar operations and got in addition apparently banquet facility cost figures.

Here is what he says, followed by the documents provided to me by him:

I read your article, entitled “Taxpayers Pay $11 Million for Dining,” and I am concerned about the way various facts were portrayed. I have always respected your efforts as a journalist; and, while I may disagree with your conclusions, it is never my intent to argue with you about public policy. It is my concern, however, when facts are recited in an incorrect way to support a conclusion. I am not suggesting this was done maliciously, but this is a complex project, and I suspect you just misunderstood or misinterpreted the information that you reviewed and that you are unaware of some aspects of how this project actually works.

In any event, here are some concerns with your article:

1) You indicate the existence of three venues—the Burnham, Eliot’s and Bar32—and suggest that $11M was spent on those venues. That is incorrect.

Let’s start with your review of OS&E (Owner Supplies & Equipment). You added $2,543,896 to your calculation for these venues. In fact, the actual OS&E is $2,925 for the Bar32, $54,750 for Eliot’s and $73,334 for the Burnham, for a Continue Reading »

Two mentions of a presidential candidate endorsement crossed my desk this morning that, while I sure she is glad to have the nod, Hillary most likely wishes the leg-up stayed under the radar.

The first comes from the far-right propaganda machine, The Reason Foundation. Headlined Hooray for Hillary Clinton’s Ties to Walmart, reasonista and editor of Future of Capitali$m, Ira Stoll ledes:

Senator Bernie Sanders is emailing supporters highlighting the fact that his opponent in the Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton, is being supported by “enormous checks from people like Alice Walton (yes, Wal-Mart).” And it is true. Federal campaign finance records show that Walton, of Bentonville, Arkansas, gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign $2,700, and then wrote another check, for $353,400, to the “Hillary Victory Fund.”

The support for Clinton’s campaign represents something of a political shift for Walton. Previously, her large donations had mainly gone to Republicans. The Federal Election Commission records show she donated a total of $200,000 in 2011 and 2012 to a committee backing Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, and a total of $2 million in 2004 to a group supporting President George W. Bush’s reelection. Additional contributions of more than $150,000 in the past dozen years have gone to groups supporting Republican candidates for the House and Senate.

Sen. Sanders seems to think that voters who view Walmart as the embodiment of evil will be horrified to learn of Walton’s support for Clinton. Maybe some voters will indeed recoil at the news. But as an optimist and as a supporter of free markets, I view it as a hopeful sign that Clinton is returning to her senses about Walmart.

“Returning” is the key word, because there is a substantial history here. As the New York Sun reported in a 2006 editorial, when Clinton’s husband was an Arkansas politician and she was the real breadwinner in the family, she served, between 1986 and 1992, as a member of Walmart’s corporate board of directors. By 2006, when Clinton was serving as a United States senator from New York, she returned a $5,000 contribution from the Walmart political action committee, explaining via an aide that she had “serious differences” with the company’s practices.

The New York Sun picked up Stoll’s column and was kind enough to include a Colbertesque photo of Stoll

Since Stoll puts Bernie, and not Hillary in his lede, he hopes to taint Hillary just enough so that the Democratic Socialist (code for Stalinist fellow traveler) Bernie will get the nomination and be easily trounced by Trump, Cruz, Kasich or the Audio-Animatronic figure of Ronald Reagan borrowed from the Hall of Presidents.

Sadly, since Bernie polls better than any of these (although the vigor of Reagon’s animatronic does make it the hardest to beat) Stoll’s hit piece only helps the Senator from Vermont.

Today is the mid-point of the action in Washington and Democracy Awakening has ask for the support of those of us who can’t make the trip to our nation’s capital. They’ve distributed a Solidarity Toolkit for our use.

This post will remain stuck to the top of the page until Tuesday morning.

A first-of-its-kind gathering in our nation’s capital is putting We the People back in charge of OUR democracy.

Democracy Awakening — organized by Public Citizen, the NAACP, the Communications Workers of America, Greenpeace USA, People For the American Way, the Democracy Initiative and nearly 200 other allies — will bring thousands of Americans to Washington, D.C., from April 16-18 for a long weekend of workshops, trainings, rallies, music, advocacy and direct action in support of voting rights and money in politics reform.

Why?

The very essence of our democracy is in peril. We simply cannot wait any longer to:

• Overturn U.S. Supreme Court rulings like Citizens United that have allowed billionaires and Big Business to spend literally without limit in their attempt to take over our elections.
• Demand that Congress do its constitutional duty and commit to a fair and timely confirmation process for the next Supreme Court justice.
• Fully restore the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that was gutted by the Supreme Court’s recent Shelby County decision, enabling states to reinstitute discriminatory Jim Crow-era laws.

Buses, vans and trains are being organized in cities up and down the East Coast to help you get to Democracy Awakening.

Check out the Democracy Awakening website and RSVP to receive more information.

Be there in our nation’s capital when democracy awakens!

Onward,

Courtney Fuller
Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign

So, while reading Steph Harmnon’s Breaking borders: how to make the best bookshop in the world—a good read about independent bookstore chain Readings—I succumbed to a bit of click bait: The 10 best independent bookshops in the world—readers recommend.

Years ago I did coffee house tours of Cleveland, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky and reading The Guardian’s Bookshop Bucket list in celebration of Independent Bookshop Week, I’ll be visiting my personal favorite Mac’s Backs on Coventry to celebrate on Wednesday, made me think I need to do a similar tour here in Cuyahoga County this summer.

Recommendations please?