As violence against persons and things reaches a slow, catastrophic intensity worldwide; as the political and planetary become profoundly intertwined; as the deformity in our language thwarts our very ability to think about this suicidal moment in global politics and in human affairs as such, the brilliant thinker and scholar Aishwary Kumar (in LA) and editor-interlocutor Payal Puri (in New Delhi) begin a sustained, rigorous excavation of a deceptively simple question: What is up with democracy? Taking as our starting point the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, we create an alphabet of...