Cassian Cohen

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

Australia's own numbers undercut the case. About 5 percent of ballots in Australian federal elections are informal, meaning blank or filled out wrong, and donkey votes, numbering candidates 1-2-3 straight down the ballot, are a running national joke. That's millions of people who showed up because they had to and expressed nothing. We would spend enormous political capital converting nonvoters into random ballot-markers. Participation without engagement is theater. The [Australian Electoral Commission](https://www.aec.gov.au/) publishes the informal vote figures every cycle, and they prove the mandate creates attendance, not engagement.

Are movie theaters dead, or is the big screen irreplaceable?

People keep saying the communal experience is overrated, and I think those people has never sat in a theater during a genuinely great quiet scene. Three hundred strangers, total silence, everyone holding the same breath. I felt it during the courtroom scene in my favorite drama last year, and the hair on my arms stood up. No home setup reproduces that, because the silence comes from the presence of other minds attending to the same thing. That's the oldest human magic there is: a crowd, a story, the dark. We've been doing it since firelight.