Notes about whatever's living rent-free in my head — usually internet culture, tech, or business related, but sometimes Disney parks, keyboards, etc. Started as a self-indulgent Covid-era diary, now we here.
Welcome back to my newsletter, y’all. You’re getting this because, at some point, you signed up to receive weekly letters from me about… well, whatever’s on my mind that week. The last time I posted regularly, in 2020, that was pretty much always Covid and stuff I was doing to get through the pandemic. Stuff like making a new cocktail every night or finding all 900 Korok seeds in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Someday I may write about why I fell off the newsletter wagon for more than a year. But first, I want to talk to you about webcams.
Last week, Apple announced their first new mainstream computer monitor in more than a decade. The new Apple Studio Display is not the most impressive monitor, but with a 5K, wide-gamut color panel it’s pretty good. The new Studio also doesn’t have a full docking solution, in that it has 3 USB-C ports which will still require dongles, but at least the dongles can stay on your desk and be hidden out of sight.
This brings me to the webcam and speakers, especially the camera, which really ought to be its killer feature. We all need good cameras more than we used to, and because Apple is generally very good at getting attractive images out of tiny cameras.
Which is why it’s such a shock that early reviews say the Studio Display’s webcam is not only unimpressive — it’s actively bad.
You can understand why I anticipated that the Studio Display’s webcam would be the GOAT (Greatest of All Time). Yet Apple’s camera consistently produced grainy and washed-out images. There was so much missing detail in some of the shots that it reminded me of the camera on my old BlackBerry. On the plus side: No one could see my frizzy hair.
Apple has a long history of producing amazing images with 12-megapixel sensors and A-series chips, and for some reason, this thing just looks awful.
Actually, it looks awful in good light and downright miserable in low light. I’ve tried it connected to the Mac Studio and on my MacBook Pro running macOS 12.3, and on both machines, it produces a grainy, noisy image with virtually no detail. Turning off the Center Stage feature that follows you around the room doesn’t help. Turning portrait mode on and off doesn’t help.
John Gruber, who you’d expect to find some way to call an Apple product industry-leading if at all possible:
Is the Studio Display camera unusable? No. I suppose it’s at least as good as the image quality from the camera on Apple silicon MacBooks. But that’s a low bar. How can the image quality from the camera on a $1600 display be so much worse — laughably worse — than the image quality from a $600 iPad Air that uses the exact same camera hardware? Let alone comparing it to the front-facing camera on the $430 iPhone SE, which makes the Studio Display camera look like a toy. And we waited years for Apple to ship this display.
…Multiple little birdies familiar with the Studio Display, each birdie independent of the others, tell me that the image quality problems really are a software problem, not hardware — a bug introduced at the last minute — and a future software update might not merely somewhat improve image quality, but raise it to a level commensurate with the iPad models equipped with the same camera.
It’s great that the badness is likely to be fixed in a software update, but my disappointment started even before the reviews came out, when Apple said they’d equipped this fancy new display with the same camera system as the iPad. I feel Apple has missed an opportunity to make a truly great, innovative webcam, and instead settled for just being the best in a crappy field.
Uneven color. Blown highlights. Smudgy detail, especially in low light. Any affordable webcam (even at the high end of affordability, $100+), uses inadequate and typically years-old hardware backed by mediocre software that literally makes you look bad. You might not notice this if you’re using video software that makes your own image small, but it will be obvious to other people on the call.
After two years of seeing co-workers mainly through grainy, poorly lit, often glitchy Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet video calls, we all want — nay, deserve — computer cameras that will make us look good.
Some of us have invested serious money and time in this. How many people have become “streamers” over the last year, with studio lights, fancy microphones on boom arms, and DSLR cameras hooked up to capture cards, only for their main “streams” to be work calls? This has led to a real haves vs have-nots situation where picky people with disposable income get to look like themselves at work, and others get to look like an impressionist painting.
The startup Opal has attracted lots of attention (not to mention people clamoring to give them $300) for their still-in-beta, invite-only webcam, which combines premium components (a big 4K sensor; an f/1.8, wide-angle lens) with smart software to produce video that looks like it came from a DSLR, at a fraction of the cost. (The Verge, Input, and Minimal Goods all have good hands-on reviews of the Opal.)
These image samples from Opal’s website show their $300 webcam looking as nice as a $2300 full-frame Canon camera, which is obviously better than Apple’s regular webcam.
The look of Opal footage reflects a choice about the kind of camera they wanted to emulate: a $2,000 full-frame mirrorless camera, with a nice wide-open lens that produces the attractive, subtle optical blurring effect called bokeh. Opal’s Mac app can add bokeh to your image, just like Apple’s Portrait Mode, and also gives the user control over settings like exposure and color saturation, just the sort of thing someone would want if their ideal was basically a simpler, cheaper Canon EOS R.
“Good” is subjective, of course. Opal has pegged “good” as images that look like they were shot by a tasteful professional with high-end gear, which is probably the right move for a product that’s being marketed as a great solution for conferences and business meetings.
On the 12 Pro, the digital manipulations are aggressive and unsolicited. One expects a person’s face in front of a sunlit window to appear darkened, for instance, since a traditional camera lens, like the human eye, can only let light in through a single aperture size in a given instant. But on my iPhone 12 Pro even a backlit face appears strangely illuminated. …
Gregory Gentert, a friend who is a fine-art photographer in Brooklyn, told me, “I’ve tried to photograph on the iPhone when light gets bluish around the end of the day, but the iPhone will try to correct that sort of thing.” A dusky purple gets edited, and in the process erased, because the hue is evaluated as undesirable, as a flaw instead of a feature. The device “sees the things I’m trying to photograph as a problem to solve,” he added.
The qualities Apple cameras optimize for, like rich colors and clear, bright faces, are generally good things to have in a photograph, and definitely what you’d want in a webcam image. And I truly think Apple applies such aggressive processing because most of the time it results in pictures people really like.
The problem is that Apple applies this processing indiscriminately and too much. Their smart cameras have no concept of “natural,” and the Apple engineers that programmed them seem to love showy HDR photos so much that they taught our phone cameras to eradicate all shadows.
Essex County, NJ’s Livingston Mall vaccination site, inside a disused Sears store
April 17, 2021 • Day 400
Hi friends. I know, it’s been a minute.
I was gonna do a thing where I put in the datelines from all six or seven of my abandoned Issue #14’s scratched out, but while Substack (apparently) does support transphobia or harassment so long as it attracts paying subscribers, they do not currently support the scratching-out of text for comic effect. 🤷🏻♂️
That today is Day 400 is just a coincidence, but while we’re on the subject: at some point, it was unthinkable that we’d still be in “lockdown” or “quarantine” longer than a few weeks. But almost immediately after that, it seemed inevitable that we’d be in this situation for at least this long.
At this point, my wife and I are both fully vaccinated (with the oh-so-fashionable, not-blood-clot-inducing Möderná shot), as are her parents, who are coming to visit on Monday.
We both became eligible in January, when New Jersey opened up vaccinations to people with preëxisting conditions. Here where we live in Essex County, most vaccinations are being done at a network of county-run super-sites. The Livingston Sears site is friendly, professional, and efficient — a model of what government can be, of how it is in places that care about taking care of people.
Also on Monday: our 6-year-old, who is obviously not vaccinated, is returning to (part-time, hybrid-model) in-person school for the first time in over a year. Life is returning to normal-ish, but as always it’s uncanny normalcy. My daughter will going to a classroom, but bringing her Chromebook so she can do her virtual lessons in the same room as her teacher and classmates, while masked, distanced, and snack-less.
This is what I imagine all Covid-era hybrid-in-person school is like
Despite the vaccination floodgates now being open throughout metro NYC, my office remains closed with no ETA for reopening. I feel safe doing my own grocery shopping, but it seems like no one else does — except the Amazon Prime delivery shoppers, of course.
Based on where we are, relative to where Gu thought, that seems plausible… but it’s fair to wonder whether the absence of mask mandates or the ability to go to the movies are actually “normal,” or just another new world we have to learn to live in.
A Demaree & Demaree joint
For a while my six-year-old daughter, June, has been into reading comics and graphic novels. Most of the ones she gets are way over her head, with teen-friendly storylines and sophisticated jokes. But she loves (and can follow) the visual storytelling. And, being six, anything she loves she will ask for constantly on repeat.
I went to art school and received training in drawing, painting, and sculpture, and then went on to spend most of my adult life doing computer and business things and hardly ever drawing or painting. Having built all the Legos, perfected my WFH desk, and made most of the cocktails in all my books, helping my kid achieve her (TBH) insane creative vision has been a great pandemic project.
June loves bunnies as much as she loves comics. For one of the first comic strips she demand—I mean, requested, she asked me to make a comic about a bunny that lost its egg. I decided to have some fun with the bunny’s reactions to the situation.
Much later she asked for a comic about bunnies at “Easter Club,” which on subsequent pages of this four-page epic was retconned to the “Easter Egg Academy,” the organization that sends Easter Bunnies around the world to deliver baskets and eggs. As you can see, it’s time to discuss EGG BUSINESS.
In another multi-page comic, some kittens’ naps had been disturbed by one of their friends making a racket. Here, the friend tries many ways to make it up to them, to no avail.
This week, she asked me — where by “asked” I mean she walked over, placed my lap desk on my lap, then silently handed me a PaperMate Flair pen and a stack of Post-It Notes — to make a “Unicorn’s Handbook” with all the lessons one needs to be a great unicorn. This was lesson number one:
For a recent bathtime drawing, continuing a deep interest in cats doing things, June asked me to draw a cat scientist creating a cat robot, with a control panel on its chest. (That’s it, that’s the design brief.)
Later, she asked me to do a non-bath-tile-based version, which I used as an excuse to try out Adobe’s Fresco drawing app for iPad. Here’s the level of mad-scientist-cat-drawing I can achieve with time and extra layers to plan out my work:
Most recently, she asked for a comic called “Gross, Carlos!” which is ostensibly about a Corgi named Carlos who does gross things. That said, she then named six or seven other dog characters — all with elaborate hairstyles, for some reason? — who she wanted to see first, such as Ellie English Bulldog, Greg and Greta Great Dane, and Naima Newfoundland. (The little scribbly dog peeking at the edge is Carlos Corgi, crowded out of his own comic.)
My other current project is moving my website and blog to WordPress, and with all this new practice drawing, I decided that instead of an uncomfortably cropped or color-graded photo of myself on my new homepage, I would try making a self-portrait in Fresco (with a guest appearance by my dog, Johnny Cash). Look for a version of this drawing on my site redesign, coming soon:
Anyway, I hope all your side projects are going well, and that if you’re not already part of the Pfizer Pham, Moderna Mob, or Johnson & Johnson Blood-Clot Crew, that you get your shots soon.
This week there are some notable birthdays! I turn 40, and SARS-CoV-2 turns 1.
One year ago, more or less, a novel coronavirus spilled over from a bat or pangolin in central China to its first-ever human host, who passed it to others, who passed it to more, resulting in the first recorded cases of the illness that would later be named Covid-19. It would be over a month before reports of a new virus started to gain traction in Western media, over two months before the Diamond Princess or the Chinese lockdown and U.S. travel ban, all of which were before the first confirmed U.S. cases, before the outbreak in Italy, before everything.
It’s hard to remember now, but there were more than two months in 2020 where news coverage wasn’t just about the coronavirus or the election, and what virus or election coverage there was tended to have much narrower angles, because these stories hadn’t yet taken over the whole of human (or at least American) experience. This Feb 7 episode of the Eater podcast, featuring an interview with Hong Kong-based food writer Andrew Genung talking about the impact of Covid (which wasn’t yet called Covid) on the local dining scene, feels like a time capsule from another era.
The first Covid case was diagnosed on Dec 1, 2019; I turned 39 on December 3. This week I’m turning 40 in a world that has been turned fully upside down by the virus that emerged a year ago. Hopefully, next year I’ll turn 41 in a world where things are starting to turn back toward normalcy. And there’s reason to hope that’ll be the case.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this tweet, and huge scientific achievement represented by the list of dates and vaccine milestones in it:
As impressive as it is that medical science will have gone from the first known case of a novel virus to the first effective vaccinations against it in just 376 days — beating the previous record for vaccine development by more than 3 years, which was for a disease (mumps) that had been around for ages — that timeline actually obscures the real achievement here.
Moderna and the NIH designed their vaccine just five days after the virus’s genome was sequenced, which in turn was a little over a month after it was first discovered, which was likely delayed by an initial cover-up or reflexive denial by Chinese health authorities. The vaccine they designed in January is more or less the same one that will be deployed starting this month; everything since then has been testing and validation.
I think there’s a story in there for tech folks about the value of platforms. mRNA vaccine tech (as used by both Moderna and Pfizer) has been around for years, but never used in a shipping product. It’s a new ‘tech stack’ for vaccines, which means it’s relatively expensive, and the viruses for which we’d most need a new, rapidly developed vaccine are complex ones like HIV, Ebola, or Zika that are harder to vaccinate against. In a way, Covid is the perfect target for this kind of approach: it has exactly one weird genetic trick (the spike protein, which binds hard and fast to our ACE2 receptors if our immune systems don’t know to block it) and it mutates slowly (meaning that an effective vaccine is likely to stay effective longer than, say, a flu vaccine).
Today’s episode of the NYT’s Daily podcast is all about when and how we’ll get these vaccines. Pharma reporter Katie Thomas cites a recent CNN interview with Dr. Moncef Slaoui, head of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program, who says we could achieve a herd immunity threshold (of around 70%) in the U.S. as soon as May 2021 — months earlier than previous estimates. That seems wildly optimistic, but so far nearly everything in the timeline for these vaccines has gone according to plan, which only underscores the scientific achievement.
Of course, even the best plans seldom survive contact with the enemy, and we’re overdue for a real setback. Maybe it’ll be people not wanting to get vaccinated. Maybe it’ll be major logistical problems delivering these vaccines and administering the cold-frozen, two-shot doses to everyone who needs them. Maybe Republicans will shut down the government just to make Joe Biden look bad.
But for now I say we take the win. This will have been a lost year for many people. I owe my wife an answer about whether I want takeout or a home-cooked meal for my birthday — both sound good, but neither is what I really want, which is a meal out of the house in a restaurant that is full of people and not under threat from a deadly virus.
The day when we can all do that again is coming, if not in May than by this time next year.
Here are some things I’ve been into and up to this week:
I’ve been playing a lot of Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity on my Nintendo Switch. It’s a spinoff/prequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, set during the war against Ganon 100 years earlier that kicked off the previous game’s story. Hyrule Warriors is a “hack and slash” game, not an open world adventure — you control a party of playable characters (Link, Zelda, the four Champions, others too) and just go to town on monsters, trying to clear levels and rack up as many KOs as you can.
In the middle-to-late game, part of the challenge is multitasking: you’ll have to defeat multiple bosses at different points on the map, while also defending a position or protecting someone — if you can’t manage to do it all, you lose. Winning means not just beating the shit out of Guardians and Lynels, but making the best use of your multiple characters and deploying them to the right places on the map.
In other levels, you control one of BotW’s giant robot animals, the Divine Beasts, the object being to defeat literally tens of thousands of monsters — whole armies — within a time limit.
The game is developed by Koei Tecmo, not Nintendo, but the Zelda creative team (and BotW’s voice actors) were involved. It’s not as perfect or engrossing as Breath of the Wild (I mean, what even is?) but it’s lots of fun.
Somehow I made it to now without ever using a Samsung device. That changed a couple weeks ago, when I got a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 (😅) for work “research.” (I kid, it actually is for a work project.) It’s a really weird, interesting device — folded up it’s a weirdly tall and thick candybar-shaped smartphone, that unfolds into a square-shaped, Kindle-sized tablet.
I can’t say I recommend this phone — it’s $2,000 unlocked (though Samsung offers trade-in deals and payment plans that lower the price) and one could get literally any other flagship phone on the market and still have hundreds of dollars left over. And because it’s Android, and my family is so bought into Apple’s ecosystem, it’s hard for me to fully commit to using it — I end up also carrying an iPhone for iMessage, Things, Apple Watch stuff, etc.
On the other hand, it’s really cool to show off, and the Kindle-ish shape and size are surprisingly appealing. It’s not quite big enough to be used as a tablet, but a nice size for a really big phone that collapses into a smaller phone, and the cameras are pretty nice.
Lastly, for a long Thanksgiving weekend project, my 6-year-old and I built the enormous, 4,000 piece LEGO Disney Castle. Once upon a time our family was slated to go to Disney World this week (as our backup plan for an originally scheduled trip in April). When those plans (and all the plans) fell through, I snagged this set over the summer so we could build a bit of Disney magic at home.
Stay safe and happy, everyone. Talk to y’all again next week.
I skipped last week’s newsletter because, frankly, there were already too many takes flying around, and I didn’t have the energy to shoot one off myself. You’ve probably heard the oft-quoted saying, “don’t talk unless you can improve on the silence.” Researching this just now I’ve seen it attributed most often to Jorge Luis Borges, but also to American politician Edmund Muskie, spiritualist Anthony de Mello, generically as a “Spanish proverb,” Anjelica Huston’s character in the movie Ever After, and really to whoever someone heard say it last. I think I heard it last from designer Mike Monteiro, or maybe on Instagram.
Anyway, there isn’t nearly enough silence in our lives right now, so maybe we need a corollary saying: don’t talk unless you can somehow improve on the noise. One advantage of this being a small list for about 25 friends, as opposed to (say) a paid newsletter going out to hundreds or thousands of subscribers, is that I can take a week off without having to tell anyone about it if I don’t think I have anything interesting to add.
After skipping a week, I decided to hold this one for a couple of days to mark a milestone—250 days since my family began staying home because of Covid. Everyone else’s ‘lockdown’ may have begun at different times, usually a bit later, some a bit earlier. But we’re all at or close to hitting 250 days of this. Sometime in January it’ll be 300; in March, which is not far off at all, it’ll have been a full year.
The best news of the past two weeks, other than Biden winning the election, has been that the first two U.S. Covid vaccine trials have returned early efficacy data — and both look really, really good. Pfizer’s vaccine looks 90% effective, and Moderna’s looks 94% effective (and theirs remains stable under normal refrigeration, unlike Pfizer’s which requires cold storage and special handling). In an interview this week, Dr. Fauci subtly revised his estimate for when the U.S. will return to normal from late 2021 to “the second or third quarter,” based on the strength of these results.
But this ray of hope depends on people taking the vaccine, which in turn depends on some entity like the U.S. government coordinating a vaccination program, and citizens being willing to show up to get vaccinated.
The biggest threats to the former are Donald Trump’s continued lack of interest in doing his job, and stubborn, dangerous refusal to hand that job off to Joe Biden. The biggest threat to the latter is many Americans’ wild belief that Covid, and this whole pandemic, are a political hoax.
Trump and Republicans have now spent over a week refusing to concede. GOP leaders keep saying they want to “count every LEGAL vote” (which, like most of what they say, is doublespeak), that the election isn’t over and they’ll honor the result when it’s finalized.
More reasonable Republicans (a group that apparently includes Trump’s National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien) have adopted this wishy-washy, ‘Schrödinger’s election result’ position, saying that there should be a smooth, stable transition to a Biden administration — if he wins, when (or if) the election is finally settled. This way people like O’Brien get to acknowledge norms and probabilities, while also stating a preference for an outcome that has already been ruled out.
What Mr. Trump promised was the power to create imaginary worlds and the freedom to unleash a selfish and extravagant fantasy life, free of the constraints of political correctness or even good manners, the limits imposed by climate change and the international rules tying America to the ground. This extreme form of freedom — call it hyperfreedom — appealed to Greenwich, Conn., financiers no less than to West Virginia coal miners. It was also, as we found out in the election, attractive to some minorities.
In the traditional way to think about freedom, we want to limit or even eliminate obstacles to individual choice, but ultimately we must deal with reality. Mr. Trump’s example is to take it an extra step: Why not be free from reality as well? Indeed, this may be the ultimate goal of contemporary America: a society that is pure fantasy life, free from reality.
Covid-19 is perhaps the best lens through which to view Mr. Trump’s hyperfreedom — and its limits. Mr. Trump seemed to take the pandemic’s arrival on American shores as a personal insult. If only he could wish it away, re-election would be assured. He tried: the questions about its seriousness and lethality; the outdoor and indoor rallies and gatherings (sometimes, as with the announcement of Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee, both on the same day); the refusal to model simple public health tactics like masks; the drumbeat of assurances that it would soon pass.
It’s worth noting that Maçães, while (apparently) anti-Trump, is not necessarily a friend. His recent book History Has Begun imagines a bright post-liberal future for America; it’s been described as “brilliantly contrarian” and has blurbs from folks like Niall Ferguson (a scholar at the same conservative think tank that gave us Scott Atlas) and Marc Andreessen.
But Maçães does at least appear to be pro-reality, and with this phrase and framing he elegantly explains the lens through which Trumpers (and anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, Birthers, truthers, and other reality-deniers) view the world.
Trump and his most ardent followers believe in whatever reality is most convenient, whatever requires the least of them. It’s an extreme but also extremely lazy kind of libertarianism. Where ‘classic’ libertarians have to struggle to form a political and moral framework within the bounds of real-world society, hyperfreedom fans can just do whatever the fuck they want, without regard to constraints or consequences, because none of that shit is real to them. Hyperfreedom is the freedom to not think.
A few weeks ago, my wife’s parents (both over 75, one in poor health) attended an indoor party near their home in Michigan. This despite their children asking them to please take Covid seriously, for the sake of their ten grandchildren. About 2 weeks after this party, my mother-in-law had to be hospitalized with pneumonia; it turned out two other people who attended also came down with pneumonia. None of them tested positive, and one doctor suggested it could be Legionnaires Disease. Maybe it was Legionnaires Disease. But when three people develop a severe respiratory disease around the same time, during a global pandemic of a respiratory virus, how likely is it that this wasn’t a mini-superspreader event?
My in-laws don’t have a good answer for why they attended an indoor gathering during a pandemic. As far as I know, they don’t regret it, because it doesn’t occur to them that they made a choice that may have had consequences — they just did what felt right and normal. You can’t feel guilty for something you don’t recognize that you did.
That’s hyperfreedom for you. Hyperfreedom makes everything someone else’s problem, which in practice means it’s no one’s problem because the problems aren’t real. Either way, hyperfreedom means the freedom for important things to be none of your business, even if the world would be better off if they were your business a little bit.
This tweet thread has been making the rounds today, from an ER doctor in South Dakota who’s treated many Covid patients who, despite them or their loved ones suffering and dying from Covid, still do not believe that Covid is real:
Well, folks, we made it. Tomorrow is Election Day—one way or another, the U.S. presidential election will move out of the realm of hypotheticals, of polling models and insane debating strategies and threats to not concede, and into concrete reality.
There are folks on Twitter convinced that not only might the polls be wrong, but that polling doesn’t even matter, because the election will be decided by legal strategems, voter intimidation, and strongman tactics by an emboldened, all-powerful conservative gang. This Twitter crew are not just skeptical of models and data, they’re angry at the suggestion of anyone talking about this election as if it will be decided by the voters.
Then again, that was Saturday, when it looked like Texas Republicans were poised to get 127,000 Harris County ballots cast at drive-thru early voting sites thrown out the day before the election. As I wrote here last week, in discussing the SCOTUS ruling in DNC v Wisconsin Legislature, GOP lawyers and jurists’ big new strategy to get “the ballots” thrown out is to argue that local election authorities can’t change election processes or rules in response to the pandemic, because the U.S. Constitution only allows state legislatures to do that.
Something I didn’t appreciate when I wrote that other post is just how brazen and extreme this argument is—sure, the Constitution doesn’t explicitly guarantee a right to vote, but no one has ever tried to put these principles in conflict with each other in a Chewbacca Defense-like maneuver to throw out thousands of votes. A lot of our anxiety has come from believing that all these courts that Trump and McConnell have been packing all these years would, naturally, issue partisan decisions and side with Republicans.
Which is why it’s such great news that both the (all-Republican) Texas Supreme Court and a (Republican-appointed, very Republican) U.S. District Court judge shot the Harris County case down big time. As reported by the Texas Tribune (bolds mine):
In his ruling from the bench, Hanen said he rejected the case on narrow grounds because the plaintiffs did not show they would be harmed if the drive-thru ballots are counted. He noted, however, that the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals could think differently if the cases reaches them. The Republican plaintiffs are appealing the decision.
If he had ruled on the larger issues in the case, Hanen said he would have rejected the request to toss out votes already cast. But Hanen said he would have shut down Harris County's drive-thru polling places for Election Day, because the tents being used for the sites don't qualify as voting inside a "building,"a requirement under state election law.
It’s indecent that the plaintiffs would even bring such a lawsuit, and unsatisfying that Judge Hanen rejected it for technical reasons (the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit and could not demonstrate harm) while signaling an openness to the absurd argument that it matters whether or not voting happens inside a “building” or not.
But he echoed part of SCOTUS’s Oct 6 ruling regarding South Carolina’s witness requirement in saying he would not have thrown out ballots already cast. While conservative judges have been willing to limit and even roll back COVID-era changes to voting access, they’ve also not let these cases serve as pretext to throw out votes.
All to say: yeah, Trump says this election may end up in the Supreme Court. It’s actually already ended up there six or more times, and will probably be there again. Depending on which places have which vote margins tomorrow (and beyond), there may be court battles that shape the outcome of the election. Or there may not be. There are some glimmers of life left in our institutions and rule of law. And, in all likelihood, the next president will be chosen by voters, not Federal courts.
But on this night of calm before the storm, I am the opposite of discouraged.
I am excited about our democracy and our future. … We are taking back our country, and once we have done so, we will find that no problem is insurmountable.
Democracy is rising. It might not win on Tuesday—no jinxing here!—but if not then, the week after that, or the month after, or the year after. After more than thirty years studying our country's history, I have come to believe in American democracy with an almost religious faith.
I know it’s frightening to hear the stories of Republican leaders trying to get ballots thrown out, and right-wing thugs intimidating Biden voters, and so on. But that Republicans feel the need to engage in such tactics despite their ongoing voter suppression and gerrymandering is a tell-tale sign that they know their party has lost any hope of winning a majority of voters, and that the only way they can win an election is to cheat.
That strategy is not sustainable.
Today it’s been reported that Trump is having “un-scalable walls” built around the area surrounding the White House where he plans to hold a victory celebration tomorrow night. (Is Mexico paying for these walls too?) Not a great look for someone who will, in all likelihood, claim to have been re-elected legitimately as leader of a democracy.
Likewise, while people have asked with actual concern if things are okay here in New Jersey, given news reports that a Trumpist truck caravan shut down traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I agree with NJ Governor Phil Murphy who said “boy, to me that was was silly.” It sure will be awkward when a bunch of these people get traffic citations or court summons in the mail. Trumpism is fundamentally ridiculous and, yes, unsustainable. Obstinately shutting down things the public relies upon is their only move, and it’s really stupid. (I mean, could they have maybe chosen a less silly place for their brave stand than a rest stop in a place named Cheesequake?)
Anyway, we’ll — finally — see what happens this week.
