Drive-through ballot boxes. Walmart election centers. Sheriffs dropping off ballots door-to-door. High schoolers serving as election judges. These are just a few of the things that have turned Colorado into one of the top voting centers in America.

As part of our 2020 election coverage, OZY set out to pinpoint the most politically activated communities in the country to better understand what makes them tick. We discovered that Colorado was home to five of the top seven counties in the nation for voter turnout during the last presidential election, according to our exclusive voter participation analysis with Washington-based data and consulting firm 0ptimus.

When Ali Abou Dehn peeked through the crack in the iron door, he saw buckets of chicken and rice waiting to be served to him and his fellow prisoners. On most days, he was forced to survive by splitting an egg with five people. But on this day, March 8, 1988, prisoners were fed well to honor the 35th anniversary of the coup d’état that brought the Syrian Baathist regime to power.

Abou Dehn couldn’t wait to eat, until he took a second look through the door. This time, he saw a guard unzip his pants and piss on the food. He knew guards would kill him if he said something. “A cockroach had more value than a human in that prison,” laments Abou Dehn, now 69. He and other Lebanese former detainees have reenacted their own harrowing memories — in a film and two plays — to expose the unfathomable brutality inside Syria’s prisons.

It’s an age-old question — about the very act of getting old. And one of the best answers to the question of how best to grow old comes from the late British philosopher Bertrand Russell. At the age of 79, Russell, who died 50 years ago this February, sat down and penned a 1,000-word essay that is one of the most moving and insightful commentaries on achieving “a successful old age.” In “How to Grow Old,” Russell, also a mathematician, historian and Nobel laureate, turned his powerful mind toward comforting others — and himself — about the aging process. “In spite of the title,” the essay begins, “this article will really be on how not to grow old, which, at my time of life, is a much more important subject.”