America’s Judges Are Bungling the 2024 Election

Does Our Democracy Need a Separate Court System?

Last year, while organizing a global democracy forum in Mexico, a member of that country’s national electoral court requested I add a speaker to our program: an American judge who was an expert in how elections work.

First, I contacted election lawyers, who told me they knew of no judges with such expertise. Then I called judges, eight leading U.S. jurists in all. Among this diverse group of judges were Republicans and Democrats, those who work at the state level and the federal level, in district courts …

by Joe Mathews | March 26, 2024

A Letter From Brazil: Where a Great Democracy Invention Is Making a Comeback

A Senator Reflects on the Birth, Decline, and Coming Resurgence of Participatory Budgeting

by Humberto Costa | April 19, 2023

What are the obstacles and opportunities facing democracy today? Zócalo is publishing a series of letters to highlight how the world’s democratic ideals are faring in practice. From Brazil: Senator Humberto …

California’s Recall Is Riding a Global Wave

From Nigeria to Brazil, Democracies Are Experimenting With New Ways for People to Hold Their Elected Officials Accountable

by Joe Mathews | August 3, 2021

The recall attempt against Gov. Gavin Newsom is being widely—and wrongly—dismissed as a peculiar and illegitimate consequence of California’s strange direct democracy.

The truth is that the recall is very much …

A Turn-of-the-Century ‘Vaccine Revolt’ in Brazil Carries Seeds of Today

Anti-Science Arguments, Mistrust of Public Health, and Fake News Incited the 1904 Uprising Against Mandatory Smallpox Immunization

by Raphael Tsavkko Garcia | February 10, 2021

On November 9, 1904, the Brazilian newspaper A Notícia published the government’s vaccination plan against smallpox.

The following day, the so-called Vaccine Revolt began in Rio de Janeiro, then the country’s …

The Forgotten History of Brazil’s Concentration Camps

In the Early 20th Century, Authorities Hid Thousands of Impoverished Rural People Trying to Escape Drought

by Raphael Tsavkko Garcia | August 24, 2020

This is an excerpt from Brazilian social critic and novelist Rachel de Queiroz’s first book Os Quinze. Published in 1930 and later translated in English as The Fifteen, it refers …

A Letter From São Paulo, Where the Definition of ‘Unbearable’ Has Shifted

As Brazil’s Death Count Rises, a Writer of Fantasies Embraces Realism in Quarantine

by Sabina Anzuategui | May 27, 2020

I’ve been training myself to be productive at home since I finished high school. The very idea of becoming a writer came from an interview with Patricia Highsmith that I …

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