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"FacebookPinterest\n\nSo you\u2019re stuck in line at Chipotle, bored, behind on your news-reading\u2014yet not exactly jonesing for another rehash of the headlines. Enter the Hunger Reads, our daily compendium of the political stories we think you\u2019ll actually enjoy reading. (At least more than reading the take-out menu over and over.)\n\nWhy We\u2019re Doing Everything Backwards: How To Fix America From Below, Leon Neyfakh, Boston.com\n\nElection reformers tend to shudder at the patchwork inconsistency with which the United States approaches its national elections, and they regard the process as a woefully disorganized mess. Yale Law School professor Heather Gerken takes a different view. When she looks at all the ways in which Americans vote, she sees a national conversation about how best to hold an election\u2014one that shouldn\u2019t be squelched, but harnessed to improve voting for everyone.\nGerken\u2019s proposal for how to do this\u2014she calls it the Democracy Index\u2014has been embraced by Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her suggestion is that if someone started ranking states and electoral districts based on how smoothly and reliably their voting went, election officials would suddenly have a powerful incentive to improve\u2014to learn from one another\u2019s mistakes and to borrow the best ideas. In a 2009 book laying out the idea, she compared its potential power to US News and World Report\u2019s annual college rankings.Behind Gerken\u2019s Democracy Index lies another, bigger argument about how a society should work: When properly leveraged, the disorder and chaos that arises in a country as big as ours can be forces for progress and reform. This principle has defined not only Gerken\u2019s thinking about elections, but a range of iconoclastic, provocative arguments that have launched a new conversation in the legal world about how, exactly, American power should be distributed. And Gerken herself has emerged in recent years as one of the most closely watched young stars in the legal academy.\n\nWhat\u2019s In A Laugh?:Why Joe Biden\u2019s Laugh is the Most Devastating Political Weapon of 2012, Juli Weiner, Vanity Fair\n\nBut this particular style of laughing\u2014i.e., its specific aesthetic qualities\u2014was what made it so universally, perhaps even subconsciously, persuasive. We think New York is correct that it is an implicit suggestion &amp;quot;that everything Paul Ryan said in the debate was absurd,&amp;quot; but the laugh was equal parts bemusement as it was conspiratorial. It was a laugh that also implicitly suggested that the audience\u2014the intelligent, informed, rational, beautiful, amazing-taste-in-music-having, weight-losing audience\u2014was in on the joke. It was not an arrogant laugh; at no point did Biden seem condescending to anyone but Paul Ryan. It makes sense that Morgan called it &amp;quot;infectious.&amp;quot; Every laugh was an audience-participation question: &amp;quot;Can you believe this guy?&amp;quot;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/hunger-reads-how-to-fix-america-from-below-and-joe-bidens-ridiculous-laugh>