Less is s'more: Are the famed campfire treats gross or what?

& what a prescient U.S. Supreme Court justice had to say about gerrymandering six years ago

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Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

What if the University of Illinois decided on principle not to take athletes in the transfer portal?

Thought experiment: What if University of Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman directed his coaches to stop utilizing the transfer portal on the principled grounds that allowing student athletes to move from school to school every season on their own whim is detrimental to the spirit of college sports?

This is hypothetical — the U of I clearly takes athletes in the portal and I have no idea what private thoughts or reservations Whitman has, if any, about the overall toxic effect of the portal — but the clear result would be a talent drain and diminution of the school’s athletic success. The rules allow colleges and universities to recruit and play athletes who’ve recently competed for other schools, and any school that took the high road and refused on principle to play by those rules would drop in the standings, possibly to the detriment of its recruiting efforts.

This is the best analogy I can come up with to illustrate why the state of Illinois should not try to lead by example and use non-partisan methods to draw political maps. Yes, gerrymandering is cynical, undemocratic and poisonous to our political culture. It should be outlawed in every state. But since it’s not, and since many states controlled by Republicans try to create as many districts favorable to their party as possible, states controlled by Democrats should not unilaterally disarm.

This issue is back in the news because Texas, at the behest of President Donald Trump, is trying to impose a new map for the 2026 U.S. House races that would give Republicans 30 of the state’s 38 congressional seats, five more seats than they currently have. This has prompted Illinois, California, New York and other Democratic states to threaten reprisal actions, which in turn has inspired Republican lawmakers in such states as Indiana and Florida to consider following Texas’ lead.

This madness has no logical end, except for a change in federal law or U.S. Supreme Court decision that would rein in gerrymandering in all states. A high-court remedy was shot down just six years ago, but if these shenanigans continue getting more and more offensively absurd, maybe the court can revisit.

Rucho v. Common Cause

I’m going to take the liberty of quoting extensively from Associate Justice Elena Kagans’ dissent in Rucho v. Common Cause the 2019 case involving a Maryland political map that disproportionately advantaged Democrats and a North Carolina map that disproportionately advantaged Republicans. A 5-4 conservative majority declared partisan gerrymandering is a political “nonjusticiable” issue, but Kagan was ferocious and persuasive in her dissent:

Partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

And checking them is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country … have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. Those standards satisfy the majority’s own benchmarks. They do not require — indeed, they do not permit — courts to rely on their own ideas of electoral fairness, whether proportional representation or any other. And they limit courts to correcting only egregious gerrymanders, so judges do not become omnipresent players in the political process. But yes, the standards used here do allow—as well they should—judicial intervention in the worst-of-the-worst cases of democratic subversion, causing blatant constitutional harms. In other words, they allow courts to undo partisan gerrymanders of the kind we face today from North Carolina and Maryland. In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong. …

Is that how American democracy is supposed to work? I have yet to meet the person who thinks so. … Free and fair and periodic elections are the key to that vision. … And partisan gerrymandering can make (them) meaningless. … By drawing districts to maximize the power of some voters and minimize the power of others, a party in office at the right time can entrench itself there for a decade or more, no matter what the voters would prefer. …

The majority disputes none of this. I think it important to underscore that fact: The majority disputes none of what I have said (or will say) about how gerrymanders undermine democracy. Indeed, the majority concedes (really, how could it not?) that gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles.” …

And therefore what? That recognition would seem to demand a response. The majority offers two ideas that might qualify as such. One is that the political process can deal with the problem—a proposition so dubious on its face that I feel secure in delaying my answer for some time. … The other is that political gerrymanders have always been with us. … (But) racial and residential gerrymanders were also once with us, but the Court has done something about that fact. The majority’s idea instead seems to be that if we have lived with partisan gerrymanders so long, we will survive.

That complacency has no cause. Yes, partisan gerrymandering goes back to the Republic’s earliest days. (As does vociferous opposition to it.) But big data and modern technology — of just the kind that the mapmakers in North Carolina and Maryland used — make today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. … While bygone mapmakers may have drafted three or four alternative districting plans, today’s mapmakers can generate thousands of possibilities at the touch of a key — and then choose the one giving their party maximum advantage (usually while still meeting traditional districting requirements).

The effect is to make gerrymanders far more effective and durable than before, insulating politicians against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides. These are not your grandfather’s — let alone the Framers’—gerrymanders. …

And gerrymanders will only get worse (or depending on your perspective, better) as time goes on—as data becomes ever more fine-grained and data analysis techniques continue to improve. What was possible with paper and pen—or even with Windows 95—doesn’t hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along this road, “we the people” become sovereign no longer. …

Partisan gerrymandering operates through vote dilution — the devaluation of one citizen’s vote as compared to others. … That practice implicates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. … This Court in its one-person-one-vote decisions prohibited creating districts with significantly different populations. A state could not, we explained, thus “dilut[e] the weight of votes because of place of residence.” The constitutional injury in a partisan gerrymandering case is much the same, except that the dilution is based on party affiliation. …

And partisan gerrymandering implicates the First Amendment too. That Amendment gives its greatest protection to political beliefs, speech, and association. Yet partisan gerrymanders subject certain voters to “disfavored treatment” — again, counting their votes for less — precisely because of “their voting history [and] their expression of political views.” And added to that strictly personal harm is an associational one. Representative democracy is “unimaginable without the ability of citizens to band together in [support of] candidates who espouse their political views.” By diluting the votes of certain citizens, the State frustrates their efforts to translate those affiliations into political effectiveness. …

The only way to understand the majority’s opinion is as follows: In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals’ rights — in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this Nation’s values and law no one defends — the majority declines to provide any remedy. For the first time in this Nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply. …

(But) over the past several years, federal courts across the country — including, but not exclusively, in the decisions below — have largely converged on a standard for adjudicating partisan gerrymandering claims (striking down both Democratic and Republican districting plans in the process). …

The majority’s “how much is too much?” critique fares no better than its neutrality argument. How about the following for a first-cut answer: This much is too much. By any measure, (the North Carolina) map that produces a greater partisan skew than any of 3,000 randomly generated maps (all with the State’s political geography and districting criteria built in) reflects “too much” partisanship. Think about what I just said: The absolute worst of 3,001 possible maps. The only one that could produce a 10–3 partisan split even as Republicans got a bare majority of the statewide vote. And again: How much is too much? This much is too much: A map that without any evident non-partisan districting reason (to the contrary) shifted the composition of a district from 47% Republicans and 36% Democrats to 33% Republicans and 42% Democrats. A map that in 2011 was responsible for the largest partisan swing of a congressional district in the country.

Even the majority acknowledges that “[t]hese cases involve blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions.” If the majority had done nothing else, it could have set the line here. How much is too much? At the least, any gerrymanders as bad as these. …

The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for legislative reform are slight.

No worries, the majority says; it has another idea. The majority notes that voters themselves have recently approved ballot initiatives to put power over districting in the hands of independent commissions or other non-partisan actors. … (But) fewer than half the States offer voters an opportunity to put initiatives to direct vote; in all the rest (including North Carolina and Maryland), voters are dependent on legislators to make electoral changes (which for all the reasons already given, they are unlikely to do). And even when voters have a mechanism they can work themselves, legislators often fight their efforts tooth and nail.

Look at Missouri. There, the majority touts a voter-approved proposal to turn districting over to a state demographer. But before the demographer had drawn a single line, members of the state legislature had introduced a bill to start undoing the change. …

Artificially drawn districts shift influence from swing voters to party-base voters who participate in primaries; make bipartisanship and pragmatic compromise politically difficult or impossible; and drive voters away from an ever more dysfunctional political process. … Partisan gerrymandering has “sounded the death-knell of bipartisanship,” creating a legislative environment that is “toxic” and “tribal.” Gerrymandering, in short, helps create the polarized political system so many Americans loathe.

Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.

Kagan was right then and she’s looking more and more right every day.

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

When, exactly, was ‘Again,’ to the Trumpers who want to ‘Make America Great Again’?

I posed the above question two weeks ago and suggested a few answers. Readers had interesting thoughts.

Ken Carl — I read the words Make America Great Again as a statement of positive hope for all Americans. “Again” for me is making America once again a nation that leads in all the best aspects as we had in previous times. We are the nation that answered the call of the world for help in two world wars. We were fundamental as well as the home of the United Nations. We brought air travel, radio, television and other forms of mass communication from ideas to reality. “Again” is to embrace and celebrate a nation created with the ideals of true freedom and personal rights. “Again” is to understand, remember and continue to build up all we have accomplished: Innovation, creating opportunities, developing a positive working industry. “Again” is to be the leaders in invention, imagination and education. “Again” is not about Trump. It is not conservative or Republican. “Again: it is about the best of the United States and how we all can be better and respectfully disagree.

Jake H. The '90s were pretty stable and optimistic. The economy was strong, crime saw historic drops, urban areas were revitalized. We had the benefits of advanced old technology — reliable cars and such — without the powerful disruption of the internet age. Media balkanization was limited to right-wing radio and the first stirrings of Fox News. There was still a shared culture. Network TV was good, never better, before or since. Movies, even top-grossing ones, were actually good. The Bulls were great, Trump was a joke, in-person shopping was fun, newspapers, including our two major Chicago papers, were arguably never better.

As for laws and social attitudes on things like race, I'd argue that, by then, we were moving rapidly in the right direction, something that's impossible to say today. Thus, while far more people in 1990 disapproved of interracial marriage than today, such opposition, hanging on from prior eras, would soon unceremoniously plummet, along with similar anti-gay attitudes. Liberals were liberal, and left-wing excess stayed confined to its natural habitats on college campuses, though, even there, normie attitudes seemed to prevail (I say as someone at Northwestern at the time). In general, to someone who read history like me, it sort of seemed like we had landed at a pretty good place. And then, the internet.

I'm accustomed to seeing the good in major technological revolution when viewed at the scale of world history. The industrial revolution that made the world we know had a lot of birth pangs but ultimately so dramatically improved the standard of living for those who experienced it (and left those who didn't in conditions of dire poverty and deprivation, the prior norm for most), that I scoff when I read serious people decry industrialism generally or even, as some like Jared Diamond do, the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago, as though we would be better off as hunter-gatherers. And yet, I can't help but think that the internet revolution is a far closer question. Adopting market-based industrialism has the capacity to transform a society dramatically, turning, as it did, China from poor to rich pretty much overnight. While internet technology surely increases productivity as well, you have to read studies to see it. Meanwhile, it has produced or threatens to produce a society that's more polarized, more hateful, more distracted, more anxious, more adrift, and dumber.

Zorn — Of course there’s no going back on the internet or, at least as frighteningly, on AI.

Deborah Lynn Karabin — Although we all look forward to new things in the future, there were many things we did better early on. Like not saying F words all the time. Like having kids after we were married. Like being respectful to one another even if you don't agree with them politically. I'm a conservative member of the GOP. I think MAGA is an evolution of a campaign slogan that Trump has made into a partisan battle cry. The country has come a long way from Biden's disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal and Obama's bizarre payoff of Iran.

Zorn — I agree that it’s generally better for a child to have two parents in the home and that respectful disagreement is better than the vitriol so often thrown around now. But surely you see that President Trump — with his name-calling and deeply vengeful behavior toward anyone who doesn’t embrace his whimsical and often bizarre notions — is leading us in the opposite direction. And, while I hate to be disrespectful, good lord, the conservative obsession with the withdrawal from Afghanistan (13 U.S. service members killed) and the Benghazi attack (4 Americans killed) from supporters of a president whose failure to mount a timely, effective response to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic cost tens of thousands of excess deaths in the U.S. is staggering. Makes me say the F word, in fact.

Mark K. — "Make America Great Again" is a dog whistle and a war cry for white supremacists. The time they want to go back to is when straight "Christian" white men had an inherent advantage simply by being born that way and held most positions of power.

The most progress we'd made toward the promise of the American Experiment was in the early 2010's, when we had a Black president, a woman Speaker of the House, expanded access to medical treatment, and legalized gay marriage. Pretty much everything since then has been a reactionary backlash. What we have since lost are reproductive rights, trust in independent institutions, the rule of law, advancements in equal rights and opportunities, valuable alliances around the world and global standing.

Beth Bales — Perhaps a lot of white men regarded the 1950s as just fabulous -- for them. Many women might have agreed with them, except those who felt their brains turning to mush and wishing for something more than enduring endless cocktail parties on weekends. You dismiss the '60s for various shortcomings, including the Vietnam War, yet the ‘60s helped stop that war. My point is that problems existed in each and every time of our lives. I'm not sure what era Trump wants to return to MAGA. Obviously it's one he considers better than today.

Ted B. — "Again" in MAGA is purposefully vague, and mostly about economics, class and lack of trust in the “elites.” “Again” is when wealth wasn't as concentrated and the diploma divide wasn't as large. When there were family-sustaining jobs and more stability throughout the Rust Belt. The infuriating part is that a bunch of billionaire opportunists were able to take advantage of what are legitimate concerns of the working class.

The brilliance of Mary Schmich

Phillip Seeberg — I thoroughly enjoyed and related to Mary Schmich’s column about the death of her high school boyfriend. My prom date died five or so years ago, and it hurts, even though we had spoken just once in the previous 20 years. A piece of us dies when a part of our past dies.

Nancy Meyer — Mary Schmich is a treasure. The column of hers you posted was deeply touching. Though we never dated, my friend Dave was the first guy in high school who said I was pretty. We became fast friends and attended each others' weddings. When, at 27, he took his own life, I was devastated. One of my first thoughts was abject horror to realize for the first time that for as long as I lived, ever so often I would suffer the torment of having someone I cared about die.

It’s gratifying that you published Mary's words on what would have been Dave's 71st birthday. Thank goodness that when he died we were caught up on what we should have said to each other.

Kelly Monty Carroll — Mary has always been one of my favorite writers, and this essay brought me to tears.

Jeanne Wolf Gieseke — Mary Schmich’s writing is just perfect.

Mike Krueger — Gave me chills.

DrummerBoy —It’s always a joy to read Mary's prose. This one was particularly poignant. It got me to thinking back to a column that Eric wrote long ago following the passing of Tribune editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly. As I recall Eric's column, he started it with a statement that he had a sticky note on his desk with a reminder to "write to Jeff." Here's hoping that Eric can share that column with his readers.

Zorn — Mary’s essay about her former beau’s death drove near-record traffic to the Picayune Sentinel two weeks ago, and I’m grateful to her for letting me share it. As for that column that followed the death of Jeff MacNelly in 2000 at the age of 52, well, you guessed it, that wasn’t my work, but Mary’s. Because we shared a space on alternating days in the metro section, readers occasionally confused our work and would compliment me for a column that she’d written.

MacNelly, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, had recently died of lymphoma, and in “Note to Jeff: Sorry I didn’t write sooner,” (gift link) Mary expressed her regret in not sending him a fond note while he was still alive in the hospital:

It’s a cautionary tale.

Who among us doesn’t keep a list, if only in our minds, of letters we mean to write or calls we mean to make before it’s too late? A list of congratulations or condolences, communications that say “get well,” “thinking of you,” “thank you,” “sorry.” Even so, we too often put it off, for various reasons, most of them as flimsy as air.

My primary reason for not writing Jeff was the most time-honored of stupid reasons: What would I say?

I didn’t want to be grim. Or maudlin. Or presumptuous. I didn’t want to be inappropriately funny, though it’s hard to imagine what “inappropriately funny” would mean to MacNelly.

So, for lack of the perfect thing to say, I said the worst thing possible — nothing.

It probably never occurred to Jeff that he hadn’t heard from me — he had more important issues and people to think about — but it occurred to me, and it feels like a small failure.

The moments of connection people make at important moments of their lives–And what moment is more important than death?–are what make us more than unrelated, free-floating assemblies of atoms banging into each other for no reason and no reward. It’s the efforts and acknowledgments, big and small, made at the right moments, that are reason and reward for our relationships with other people.

Any of us could vanish by 2 p.m. tomorrow, but saying important things to someone is particularly urgent when that someone is ill or old, when it’s someone whose time is more obviously likely to be short.

Do you know someone like that? Write soon.

This ‘Penguin’ does fly

Mark K. — Eighty-five percent of the respondents to your poll on streaming TV shows said they hadn’t seen “The Penguin,” on HBO/Max, so I'll extend my recommendation. Colin Farrell is amazing in the main role, completely unrecognizable. Cristin Milioti is also terrific. It's set in the “Batman” universe, but really just nominally, it's really about organized crime, political corruption and family relationships. The Penguin's story arc and background is really tragic. Highly recommend.

Zorn — It’s now on my list of shows to watch. I hadn’t seen “Adolescence,” the four-part Netflix series, at the time I posted the poll, but I found time over my recent break and would give it a bright green light. Amazing acting and cinematography and a poignant, tragic story.

Once again, how to un-scam your Tribune home-delivery subscription

Bob Jank — I remember you told readers about a better way than calling the customer-service line for Sunday Tribune home-delivery subscribers to avoid paying for the monthly “premium issues” for which the paper charges up to $15 each. Can you remind me of that procedure?

Zorn — Yes. If you email cswork_level1@tribune.cust-serv.com (don’t neglect the underscore between the k and the l), and include your subscription details, you can opt out of this inflated and fairly hidden overcharge for six months. You will still receive mini-magazines like this one from last Sunday tucked in among the ad supplements and other giblets —

— but you won’t have to pay the additional fee. Why doesn’t the Tribune publicize this email address? Why does the opt-out expire after six months? Why are these “premium issues” not labeled or priced? I have asked Tribune brass many times for a response, but I’ve never heard back.

But we all know the answer, don’t we? They count on enough of us being lazy or inattentive that they can quietly charge extra for material few if any subscribers asked for and in most cases don’t even want. “Shady” is a very kind word for it, and it’s something to remember next time the Editorial Board mounts its high horse to scold others about the value of transparency.

You can also still call 312-546-7900 and navigate the phone tree.

Let’s crowdsource this one!

Monday afternoon, this text came in from a number I didn’t recognize in British Columbia:

I’ve regularly receive what appear to be misdirected texts like this — not sure exactly what the scammers’ game is as I don’t engage. But this one was personal (and funny) enough to make me want to respond in a way that might amusingly scam the scammer, or at least cause them to waste their time.

I’m asking for suggestions on what my answer should be. Post your ideas in comments or e-mail me, and maybe we can keep this text conversation going.

Unpopular opinions?

S’mores are vastly overrated

Every summer now, the cast of the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast joins around a literal campfire for a run of aimless episodes titled “Summer S’mores with Conan and the Chill Chums.” But they disagree strongly on the subject of s’mores — the gooey confection in which a toasted marshmallow and slab of milk chocolate are squeezed in a graham cracker sandwich. Here’s O’Brien:

I think they’re terrible. I just think that it’s a flawed concept. And I do believe people like s’mores because they think they're supposed to. It’s kind of enforced recreation, enforced joy. But people don't really like, “Hey, here's a graham cracker, here's a not-very-well melted marshmallow and a piece of inferior chocolate. Let's jam them all together and chomp it.” There's often nothing to drink with s’mores. I always see kids stuffing this roof tile down their mouths— they do it because they've been instructed by The Man that this is what they're supposed to do. But they don't really like it.

Sona Movsesian, one of his sidekicks, clapped back:

They are the most delightful snack that you can have in this environment. You can melt the marshmallow as much as you want to melt it. It gives you full control over your s’more. How many desserts can you say that about? I don't think you've ever had the right kind of s’more.

In “Why I’ll Never Ever Eat a S’more Again,” Kristina Razon, deputy food editor of The Kitchn, writes of the smore:

(It’s) far too sweet. …. It’s a texture violation. … It’s difficult to eat and the crunchy, mushy mash-up always feels like a fail — like the chocolate should be more melty. What do folks find appealing about this? I’ll never know. (And) S’mores are a mess to eat. … Every time I attempt to eat a s’mores, half of it ends up on the ground. After just one bite in, I find that the graham crackers start to crumble, the chocolate tries to slide and escape out of the sandwich, and the marshmallows ooze out all over the place. They’re gooey, sticky, and incredibly awkward, and not fun to eat in public.

One of her commenters replied:

They are the best dessert, the best sandwich, and quite literally my favorite food of all time … S'mores are the zenith, the apex, the absolute peak of food. The smoky flavor permeating the sweet marshmallow, toasted to a perfect crispy outside and gooey inside all nestled in between an unassuming piece of chocolate bar and two graham crackers. (Especially if there is still a little snap to the chocolate? Mmmm!) … Praise be to the ultimate camping treat.

So, dear readers, let’s imagine ourselves around the fire on a warm August night. Someone pulls out a bag of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, a short stack of Hershey bars and a few sticks with which to place the marshmallows near or into the flame. What say you?

Most recent result

From July 29, also a food-related opinion:

NewsWheel

Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. The answer is at the bottom of the newsletter.

The week’s best visual jokes

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

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Answer to the NewsWheel puzzle

DISTRICT