(Roughly) Daily

One of the most insidious obstacles to fair representation is gerrymandering, the practice of re-drawing congressional districts to favor one party or another– long a feature of American politics. With the completion of each decennial census, states redraw their their district boundaries, a process that’s underway now and that will define Congressional elections in 2022.

FiveThirtyEight is maintaining a updated interactive tracker of proposed congressional maps — and whether they might benefit Democrats or Republicans in the 2022 midterms and beyond (pictured above). Explore it to watch national governance shaped before your very eyes.

* Thomas Paine

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As we fish for fairness, we might send culture-capturing birthday greetings to Norman Percevel Rockwell; he was born on this date in 1894.  Famous as a painter and illustrator in the U.S. through much of the 20th Century, Rockwell created such iconic images as the Willie Gillis series, Ros ie the Riveter, Saying Grace (1951), The Problem We All Live With, and the Four Freedoms series.

Perhaps because he published in such settings as Saturday Evening Post and enjoyed so much popular acclaim, Rockwell was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime.  But as The New Yorker ‘s art critic Peter Schjeldahl said of Rockwell in ArtNews in 1999: “Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t.”

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