"People often move for a reason that seems to have nothing to do with politics but then turns out to correlate to politics quite closely."

"According to a Pew survey, for instance, nearly eighty per cent of liberals like the idea of living in a dense neighborhood where you can walk to shops and schools, while seventy-five per cent of conservatives would rather live in a larger house with more space around it. After people move, the politics of the new place affect them. Those who move to a politically dissimilar place tend to become independents; those who move to a place where people vote the same way they do tend to become more extreme in their convictions. But there also seems to be something about the act of moving that disturbs people’s beliefs, regardless of where they end up. One woman left Orange City to attend college in a place that was, if anything, more conservative than her home town, but, even so, the experience changed her. 'Both of my parents are vocally conservative, so I thought I was a Republican all these years, but my views have changed,' she says. 'Living outside of a small rural town gives you a different perspective. When I think about taxes now, what comes to my mind is school funding coming from taxes, which perpetuates poverty, because schools in lower-income areas have lower graduation rates. When I think about immigration, I think, We all immigrated at some point—well, most of us—can we not remember that?...'"

From "Where the Small-Town American Dream Lives On/As America’s rural communities stagnate, what can we learn from one that hasn’t?" by Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker.

Orange City is in Iowa, and I was listening to the audio version of the magazine as I took a walk in my neighborhood, over around by the stadium, where the home team is playing Iowa right now.

Aaron Swartz's "family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes."

"They have done this because it is what he would have wanted, and because it is a way to extract some good from the event. They tell people that the experience of being prosecuted is annihilatingly brutal, and that prosecutors can pursue with terrible weapons defendants who have caused little harm. One of the corollaries of this message is that Swartz did not kill himself; he was murdered by the government. But this claim is for public consumption, and the people closest to him do not really believe it. They believe that he would not have killed himself without the prosecutors, but they feel that there is something missing from this account—some further fact, a key, that will make sense of what he did."

Larissa MacFarquhar — in The New Yorker — looks at the real complexities of the Aaron Swartz story. This is an extremely impressive piece. Read the whole thing. The passage above is the best abstract summary of what is in the piece, and I'll extract a few more things that are better examples of the kind of details that flesh out that abstraction:

He disliked all vegetables and refused to eat them except in extremely expensive restaurants, such as Thomas Keller restaurants. He had ulcerative colitis, a serious digestive disorder similar to Crohn’s disease; he also thought that he was a “supertaster,” experiencing sensations of taste more intensely than regular people. Partly for these reasons, he ate only foods that were white or yellow. He ate pasta, tofu, cheese, bread, rice, eggs, and cheese pizza. He was phobic about fruit and wouldn’t touch it. He rarely drank alcohol and was careful to stay hydrated. He went through four humidifiers in his apartment in Brooklyn. He said that he left San Francisco because the air-conditioning was bad....

He became a political activist.... But he never felt as strongly about any new idea as he had once felt about them. He would adopt a cause, only to become dissatisfied, deciding that it wasn’t important enough, or was too unlikely to succeed, and he would move on to something else....

He came to believe that the influence of money in American politics was so enormous a problem that possibly little else could be solved until that was. Then again, there were always other countries: in conversation with an Australian friend, he decided that it would be ridiculously easy to “take over Australia,” but that since the country had only twenty million people it wasn’t worth it.