Among the dates that stand out on the California calendar: 9/11, the day that America was struck by its deadliest act of terrorism (the California connection: all four commercial airliners were originally headed to Los Angeles or San Francisco); and 4/20, the worldwide celebration of marijuana smoking (the California connection: the ritual may or may not have begun at a Northern California high school).

For decades, the voices of dissident Chinese, like human rights lawyer and activist Teng Biao, were occasionally heard and never listened to by the larger world. Some, like Wei Jingsheng, author of the famous “Fifth Modernization” essay during the Democracy Wall movement in 1978, or Wang Dan, student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, became minor celebrities in the world of human rights and democracy promotion. Yet even the most prominent among them failed to change in any material way the world’s policies towards China. 

Hoover Institution fellow Jonathan Rodden argues that ever since President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, the Democratic Party has evolved to become an almost exclusively urban party. Rodden’s analysis—which included a geo-spatial, statistical deep dive into election and Census data from the 19th century to the present—appears in his new book, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide.

The New York Times reported on June 15 that “the United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin.” In particular, the Times reported that the United States has deployed code “inside Russia’s grid and other targets”—that is, “potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system, ... intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.” The article also noted that this step would represent a major escalation in the ongoing cyber conflict between Moscow and the United States.