Every July 4, I watch Hendrix play the national anthem at Woodstock.

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This year’s July 4 cover for The New Yorker is Chris Ware’s “A House Divided.”

Ware comments:

I was taught in school that the American experiment was rooted in consensus and compromise. But Internet algorithms have put us at an uncompromising moment of nonconsensual reality. Sometimes it seems the only thing that the left and right can agree on is that compromise is laughably naïve.

“Internet algorithms have put us at an uncompromising moment of nonconsensual reality.” I am online too much, and am about to take a summer break from all that. There is a lot of bad news, but everyone yelling about it online only feeds the machine and makes it worse. That much seems to be certain.