This has been an extraordinary autumn for student organizing in the United States. From protests against police brutality and sexual assault to anti-tuition demonstrations and a new wave of campus occupations, students have been standing up and speaking out to a degree not seen since the heyday of Occupy.

The protests of the last three months haven’t just been big, they’ve been inventive and extraordinarily diverse, too. An undergrad at Columbia created a senior project carrying a mattress around campus to shame the administration for its failure to respond to her rape, and students across the country stepped up to help her carry the weight. The killings of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and so many others have sparked sit-ins and die-ins, walkouts and speakouts. Administrators from New York to California have been forced to negotiate with and grant concessions to occupiers.

And perhaps most extraordinary has been the role of high school and middle school students. In dozens of incidents in dozens of states, such students have stood up and fought back against rape, violence, curricular meddling, and even infantilizing hall passes. They’ve been organizing and taking action, and they’ve been winning.

But although all this organizing has garnered a fair amount of interest in recent weeks, it hasn’t attracted the kind of attention it deserves. In part that’s because the agitation has been so diverse — aside from Ferguson, there hasn’t been a single national narrative tying it all together. But there’s also clearly been a lack of awareness, a lack of understanding of the scale and scope of what’s been happening.

That ends now.

What you see above is a map of fifty of the country’s most important student organizing actions of the fall semester. There are seven campus occupations on the map, along with dozens of walkouts, demonstrations, and other campaigns. The actions shown originated in twenty-five different states, and crucially more than a third of them were initiated by high school students.

This is big, but it’s just the beginning. I’ll be continuing to add material to the map in the coming weeks, both as new actions take place and as I gather more information to fill in the gaps in my knowledge about what’s happened so far. I expect to double the number of actions listed over the next few days, and to keep it growing from there.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Mario Savio’s “bodies upon the gears” speech, perhaps the crucial piece of oratory in American student history. It’s becoming ever more clear that 2014 is a moment of change, disruption, and promise much like the one the Free Speech Movement faced (and helped to bring into being) in 1964, and I hope this project can be of some service to Savio’s successors in the schools and campuses of today.

More soon.

Update | I’ve just noticed that the key to the pins is hard to find on the published version of the map. (Google Maps is a bit wonky and counterintuitive, it turns out — if anyone knows of a better option, give me a holler.) Here’s what the colors mean:

• Green is walkouts.
• Blue is demonstrations.
• Red is occupations and sit-ins.
• Yellow is major online campaigns.
• Brown is other events.

Within each category, dark colors indicate actions led by college students, and light colors indicate those led by primary or secondary school students (usually high schoolers).

December 4 Update | I’ve added ten more actions to the map, and made it available as a searchable chronological list.

Are we really asking why young people didn’t vote in the midterms?

Okay, fine. Let’s talk.

But if we’re going to talk, can we start by saying that non-presidential youth voter turnout ISN’T DOWN — that it’s been essentially stable since the 1990s? Every cycle youth voter turnout is more or less the same, and every cycle it’s treated as a new Betrayal of the Nation.

And can we also note that while election-week demographic estimates of voting are always crude, the one analysis that we do have at this point says that youth turnout is actually up slightly since the 2010 midterm?

So the question “Why didn’t young people vote?” is already several kinds of stupid.

It gets worse.

We know that Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise young voters. (AS THEY ARE INTENDED TO.) And we know that Voter ID laws are getting uglier and more widespread. So if youth turnout is stable or rising, as it is, that’s actually pretty clear evidence of increased youth interest in electoral politics.

And while yes, young people do tend to vote less frequently than older people, that’s been true since before I was born, and I’m not that young anymore. Anyone alive today who’s whining about youth voter turnout is themselves part of a generation that didn’t turn out to vote in huge numbers when they were young.

The lesson here, as always, is simple: Shut up, old whiners.

Ready to move on? Okay. Let’s look at the exit polls. They show that youth were the ONLY age cohort who went majority Democratic this week.

Again: Shut up, old whiners. Middle-aged people went GOP by eight points. Stop complaining about your kids not canceling out your friends’ votes, jerks.

And the Democrats’ problem this week wasn’t a bunch of tight losses, anyway. It was a bunch of unexpectedly decisive GOP wins. A bump in youth voting doesn’t fix that. There were a few races, like the North Carolina Senate, where a shockingly huge youth turnout might have flipped the result, but not many. In Texas, for instance, under-30 voters split evenly between Davis and Abbot. That’s better for the Dems than what their elders did, but adding more 50-50 voters to a lopsided race doesn’t change the results.

Democrats got shellacked yesterday, and they would have been shellacked worse if young people hadn’t showed up to vote Dem. Youth didn’t lose this election for the Democrats — they saved it from being an even bigger disaster.

And while we’re on THAT subject, can we talk about the fact that we’re in the middle of about ten different political catastrophes for American youth right now? And the fact that the Democratic Party isn’t making any kind of a serious push on any of them?

Public higher education is being dismantled in this country. Young black men are being shot by cops with impunity. Youth unemployment is through the roof, and the jobs that do exist mostly suck. And on and on and on.

Show me the Democratic candidate who made the case for tuition cuts in this election. Show me the Democratic office-holders who are serious about reining in cops. About jobs programs. Show me the candidates who are fighting for young people, giving young people a reason to vote, a reason to be passionate about electoral politics. They don’t exist.

Democratic candidates and elected officials constantly crap on youth. And despite that incontrovertible fact, young people remain a core base constituency for the Democratic Party.

Why aren’t young people voting? THEY ARE. But how long do you think you can trick them into continuing without giving them anything back?

You want to increase youth voting? Cool. Pay attention to youth voters. Give them some wins on the legislative level. And take youth voter registration seriously — when people are registered, they tend to vote, and first-time voters have inertia working against them.

And here’s another thing we could do: Reduce the voting age to 16, like they’ve done in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Scotland.

Today in America, young people tend to start voting (or not) right as they’re moving — to college, to work, away from home. That’s a roadblock to registration, and to voting, and it’s one of the (many) reasons I support a 16-year-old voting age.

Get folks registered before they move out of their parents’ house. Get them voting. Get them in the system. People who vote stay voters. People who don’t vote stay non-voters. It’s easier to get people to start at 16 than at 18. So let’s do it. And let’s stop whining.

Lemon out.

This post is a lightly edited version of a Twitter rant from last night.

Yesterday a friend gave me her ticket to see Ruth Bader Ginsburg interviewed by Nina Totenberg at the 92nd Street Y. While I was at the talk, I tweeted that Nina Totenberg has a Notorious RBG tee-shirt, and that she wears it regularly on weekends, and that RBG gave it to her. What didn’t fit into the tweet was that Totenberg actually owns *three* Notorious RBG shirts, two of which Ginsburg gave her, from what Totenberg described — apparently seriously — as Ginsburg’s vast supplies.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg buys Notorious RBG shirts in bulk to give to her friends. That’s what I learned last night.

One other tidbit: It was widely reported a while ago that part of why RBG isn’t resigning before Obama leaves office is that she doesn’t believe anyone like her could be confirmed by the current Senate.

Totenberg asked Ginsburg about that last night, and she reiterated it, but then NT asked her the follow-up question: Wouldn’t any replacement appointed by a Republican successor to Obama be far worse, from your perspective? Ginsburg brushed that question off, saying “I’m very hopeful about 2016.”

Between what she said, the context of the question, and her inflection, I got the very clear impression that Ginsburg intends and expects to have Hillary Clinton appoint her successor.

(This post is a lightly-edited version of a Twitter rant from last month.)

When I was a young man, I believed that I won every argument in which the other participant didn’t convince me. If you wanted to best me in debate, you needed to win by my rules. Those rules were “rational,” so if you didn’t accept them, if they made you angry, if they made you withdraw, then I won. I won by default.

Anita Sarkeesian, a critic of sexism in video games, has cancelled a campus speech scheduled tomorrow after the university declined to ban guns from the venue in response to a threat of a mass shooting.

There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence, so let’s break it down.

Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist media critic who has been the subject of an ongoing campaign of harassment since 2012. Late this summer, as the #GamerGate campaign was heating up, she was driven from her home by new, specific threats against her and her family.

Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak at Utah State University tomorrow (Wednesday), but this morning several school officials received an emailed threat of “the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the speech went forward. The email’s author, who claimed to have a variety of guns and bombs in his possession, threatened a “Montreal Massacre style attack” on the speech and the campus Women’s Center — a reference to the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in which a male shooter killed fourteen women on a Montreal college campus in an explicitly anti-feminist attack.

The university announced Tuesday afternoon that the speech would be going forward with increased security, including a prohibition on “backpacks and any large bags.” This evening, however, it was announced that Sarkeesian had cancelled the talk.

So why did Sarkeesian cancel, given that she’s experienced similar threats in the past? Well, that goes back to a 2004 law that made Utah the first state in the country to require universities to allow concealed-carry permit holders to carry loaded weapons on campus. Based on the university’s statement this evening, it appears that USU does not have the discretion under the law to ban weapons from a particular event, even in the face of a specific threat against the speaker.

I have to say, this is kind of incredible. That a public university would have the ability to ban backpacks from a speech but not loaded guns strikes me as something that even many concealed-carry advocates might blanch at.

It really is extraordinary.

Update | Here’s the relevant statutory language: “Unless specifically authorized by the Legislature by statute, a local authority or state entity may not enact, establish, or enforce any ordinance, regulation, rule, or policy pertaining to firearms that in any way inhibits or restricts the possession or use of firearms. … “Local authority or state entity” includes public school districts, public schools, and state institutions of higher education.”

Second Update | Sarkeesian just tweeted that that there were “multiple specific threats made stating intent to kill me & feminists” in advance of her USU speech.

Morning Update | USU confirms that “state law prevent[s] the university from keeping people with a legal concealed firearm permit from entering the event.” They say that “University police were prepared and had a plan in place to provide extra security measures at the presentation.” Sarkeesian tweeted last night that she requested “pat downs or metal detectors” at the venue, but that “because of Utah’s open carry laws police wouldn’t do firearm searches.”

It’s not clear whether state law (or state law as interpreted by USU administrators or police) prohibits searches for firearms at campus events. But again, even if such searches had been conducted, individuals with concealed carry permits would have been allowed to bring loaded weapons into the room. According to the Guardian, such permits are available to any state resident who is “at least 21 years old, mentally competent, and hasn’t been convicted of a felony or crimes involving violence, alcohol, narcotics or ‘moral turpitude.'”