The New Yorker:

Every month at the Old Stone House, in Brooklyn, citizens are invited to find consolation in troubled times by writing out the nation’s founding document, by hand.

By Henry Alford

It is sometimes said that democracy wants education. Also: strong foundations make for good buildings. And: the more larnin’, the more votin’. So, the other night, when three New Yorkers showed up at the Old Stone House, a re-created 1699 farmhouse turned community center in Brooklyn, to take part in a social art project in which they would each write out a copy of the Constitution—or as much of the Constitution as they could in two hours—nothing less than the fate of the nation seemed to be at stake. One participant, upon sitting at one of the four tables in the house’s great room and eying the Uniball pen and xeroxed Constitution before her, cleared her throat with a vehemence that seemed to augur spitting.

Morgan O’Hara, an eighty-four-year-old conceptual artist who was raised in Japan, started handwriting documents that are meant to protect human rights—a practice she calls “activism for introverts”—in 2017. Appalled by the level of discourse in the 2016 Presidential election, she decided that copying out the Constitution in a public place would provide consolation by deepening her understanding of the document. She saw no need to talk about the Constitution, though. “There have been so many experiences in my life where I have a lot to say but the extroverts always win,” she said the other day, over the phone from Venice, where she lives now. So O’Hara took herself to the New York Public Library’s majestic Rose Reading Room with pen and paper and got monkish.

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