the voter-registration reminder has finally accepted that democracy may occasionally require a patriotic jockstrap. Read more →
there are many ways to remind people to check their voter registration. you can make a sober infographic. you can deploy a clipboard. or, as this Tumblr post correctly concludes, you can put the reminder next to a man in a patriotic jockstrap. democracy contains multitudes, apparently.
the useful part remains extremely useful. Vote.gov will route you to your state’s registration and status tools. in Alabama, the general election is November 3, 2026, and registration closes during the fourteen days before an election. “i will do it later” is therefore a deadline wearing a fake mustache.
the original post had already collected 190 notes by early Saturday afternoon. this is not a controlled experiment, but it does suggest civic engagement may improve when it briefly acknowledges that voters have bodies, interests, and internet connections.
so, yes: check your Alabama registration, make a plan, and then return to the important national discourse about whether the stars-and-stripes jockstrap is legally business casual.
an ancient mapping service declined one pointless authoritarian branding exercise and discovered that “no” is still a very popular feature. Read more →
MapQuest, a website I associate primarily with printing six pages of directions and then immediately missing the second turn, is suddenly the most politically relevant mapping service in America.
President Trump ordered Lake Ontario renamed “Lake America.” Google and Apple changed the label for users in the United States. MapQuest said no, kept the familiar name, and watched people download its app in numbers normally reserved for products they remembered existed before that morning.
MapQuest is now the No. 1 U.S. app after bucking Trump’s ‘Lake America’ renaming
TechCrunch reported on August 31 that MapQuest had reached No. 1 in the U.S. Navigation category, No. 4 among non-game apps, and No. 8 across the entire App Store. The company said usage had jumped to 50 times its normal level. By September 2, the Associated Press reported that it had topped the free-app charts in both the United States and Canada.
MapQuest app promotional screenshot, via the Apple App Store; reproduced for commentary.
the ancient texts foretold this
I remember MapQuest as infrastructure from the era when going somewhere new required a printer, a passenger willing to read aloud, and a solemn family agreement that nobody would mention the missed exit until Dad had finished being mad at the interstate. You did not “reroute.” You performed a three-point turn in a bank parking lot and hoped geography eventually forgave you.
Google Maps made all of that feel prehistoric. Apple Maps arrived later, initially with the confidence of a person who had never personally encountered a bridge. MapQuest remained alive in the background, apparently waiting for the exact moment that declining to participate in a pointless act of nationalist branding would qualify as product innovation.
Map by Phizzy, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.
sometimes “no” is a feature
The funny part is that MapQuest says it is not trying to make a grand political statement. General manager Doug Berger framed the decision as keeping the names users already know. This is technically customer service, which now counts as resistance because the baseline is apparently “change the map whenever the president invents a new noun.”
There is a useful lesson here for brands, institutions, and the many Democrats who react to every absurd demand by assembling a committee to determine how quickly they should comply. People are desperate to see somebody say no. It does not need to be delivered from a barricade. It can be a mapping app calmly declining to pretend that one of the Great Lakes received a patriotic software update.
MapQuest also released a tool that lets users give the lake their own joke names. This is both clever marketing and an appropriate response to governance by novelty merchandise. If the federal government is going to operate like a novelty T-shirt kiosk, the least the rest of us can do is make better jokes.
I do not know whether everybody downloading MapQuest will keep using it. Protest downloads are easy, and changing a default navigation app is harder than people admit. But even a temporary surge matters. It demonstrates that refusing to normalize something stupid can be popular, useful, and, most offensive to conventional wisdom, good for business.
Thirty years after helping America get lost with a stack of warm printer paper, MapQuest has found the route back to relevance. It was apparently just “continue straight past the authoritarian branding exercise.”
On the organizational front, a group of House Democrats aligned with a new centrist initiative, launched in the immediate aftermath of the… Read more →
On the organizational front, a group of House Democrats aligned with a new centrist initiative, launched in the immediate aftermath of the democratic socialist victories, framed the wins as a reputational liability. “They should not be the face of our party,” the group declared, positioning the effort explicitly as a corrective to the party’s direction.
The data, however, offers a more complicated picture of where the Democratic base actually stands. A Fox News poll in March showed that 49% of all registered voters, including 72% of Democrats and 60% of independents, described capitalism as working “not very” or “not at all” well.
CNN data analyst Harry Enten pointed to a poll from Marquette Law School that found the DSA now holds higher favorability than sitting congressional Democrats, from Democratic voters and leaners themselves.
Josh Lyman decides to weigh in:
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff, offered a structural diagnosis. “What the socialist wing has decided to do is turn blue districts, dark blue,” he told CNN, arguing that Democrats had broadly “lost the plot” by becoming mired in niche concerns rather than mainstream US priorities.
OH NO, whatever shall we do?! 🙄 [Avila Chevalier] maintained a since-deleted Twitter account with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and… Read more →
OH NO, whatever shall we do?! 🙄
[Avila Chevalier] maintained a since-deleted Twitter account with repeated sympathetic references to communism, Marxist ideology and Soviet figures, including Vladimir Lenin.
not me over here, yearning for the constraint of the 1930s… smdh The ruling overturned the Supreme Court’s 1935 precedent that had… Read more →
not me over here, yearning for the constraint of the 1930s… smdh
The ruling overturned the Supreme Court’s 1935 precedent that had recognized the authority of Congress to protect leaders of certain regulatory agencies from presidential removal at will.
If you are behind on payments, you may qualify for an Unemployment Deferment or an Economic Hardship Deferment, but be warned: These… Read more →
If you are behind on payments, you may qualify for an Unemployment Deferment or an Economic Hardship Deferment, but be warned: These programs are being eliminated for loans initiated on or after July 1, 2027. Forbearance will be limited to a maximum of nine months every two years for loans funded on or after July 1, 2027.
By: Raquisha Givens, Hussain Punjani, Andrew Schwegler, Savannah ViarOriginally published: November 21, 2013 It has been overwhelming stated that our world is… Read more →
By: Raquisha Givens, Hussain Punjani, Andrew Schwegler, Savannah Viar Originally published: November 21, 2013
It has been overwhelming stated that our world is becoming smaller with the use of technology. With the click of a mouse we can connect to people on the other side of the world. Technology has allowed the Earth community as a whole to become intertwined in ways that could never have been imagined a mere twenty years ago. With these ever increasing connections amongst people, governments throughout the world have taken note and have begun to use these connections in order to increase government interactivity amongst its citizens. This process is known as e-governance.
