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The refrain we hear over and over, in the United States at least, is that people today are apathetic about politics. Yet it turns out that this is far from the case. Voters in the U.S. and in democracies around the world are more engaged in politics than they've ever been. The catch is that they're disillusioned with the democratic process itself. Only 33% of Europeans have faith in the EU. The U.S. Congress has a 69% negative rating. So what gives? In Against Elections, set to be published on April 17th, David Van Reybrouck diagnoses the symptoms of our ailing democracies and comes up with a radical solution: drawing lots, rather than voting, to determine our politicians, just as the ancient Athenians did. Here as an exclusive excerpt on the Seven Stories Blog is the book's introduction, from former Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, and the first chapter of Van Reybrouck's book. 

Yesterday the the New York Times ran a feature implying there are no major health risks associated with the upcoming move to 5G cellular networks. The piece did make a convincing case that an often reproduced graph on the dangers of cell phones, first created by a Dr. Bill P. Curry in 2000, contains a serious error. But the dangers of electromagnetic fields (EMF) are broader than the article mentions, and the effects have by no means been exhaustively studied. As a primer to the subject, here is the first chapter of Martin Blank's Overpowered: What Science Tells Us About the Dangers of Cell Phones and Other WiFi-Age Devices.