The New Republic

About a month ago, on a Saturday night, I sat alone in my apartment watching the inconsequential final minutes of a playoff game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers. The Packers led 24-10 with fewer than four minutes left, and that score—reflecting a fluky touchdown by the Vikings on the prior possession—didn’t represent how clearly the Packers had dominated the game, and how certain they were to win. So why was I, a Washington Redskins fan, still watching? READ MORE >>

It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise that I’d meet a sales rep who referenced Jean Baudrillard.It was a couple of days into the Consumer Electronics Show, the gargantuan annual gathering of the gadget industry. I was idly taking notes as salesladies lured men onto a set of vibrating exercise machines, their fat jiggling, while an Asian man in a fedora and round sunglasses danced on one of them to “Gangnam Style.” A shaggy-haired off-duty software sales rep named Will Ryan asked what I was writing.  READ MORE >>

On a recent Wednesday morning, under the gaze of a mounted bison head, Native American tribal leaders filled the Senate Indian Affairs Room for their annual legislative summit. They'd been there many times before, asking for fixes to the laws that govern their existence. This time, however, brought more than the usual sense of unease. READ MORE >>

Despite one of the worst economies in the country and a large Mormon population, Nevada was always an uphill climb for Romney. Minorities constituted a larger share of the Nevada electorate than any other battleground state, enabling Obama to win the state by 12 points in 2008. READ MORE >>

Both campaigns are carefully plotting their path of least resistance to 270 electoral votes and Nevada is potentially central for each campaign. Obama won the Silver State by 12 points in 2008, but it has an extremely weak economy and the polls show have shown a close race, even if Obama has consistently held a lead. READ MORE >>

Today, a poll found Obama leading by two points in the generally uncompetitive state of Arizona, where neither campaign has aired advertisements. Given that Obama's trailing nationally and locked in a tight race in states like Nevada and Colorado, Obama probably doesn't have a lead in Arizona, so let's just cut that argument out of the discussion.  READ MORE >>

With post-debate polls showing Romney making gains nationally, the race appears tight enough to again merit consideration of the Electoral College. So what states are most important to watch after the debates? While Florida, Virginia, and Colorado could all prove decisive, the pre-debate polls suggested that Romney's biggest problems were Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio. Consider an average of post-DNC polls in the battleground states: READ MORE >>

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In 1906, James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University assembled a list of the 1000 most eminent American scientists of his day and published an analysis of their geographic distribution in the journal Science, including the 40 cities with at least five top scientists. Those cities correspond to 30 metropolitan areas today. Those metropolitan areas were home to 26 percent of 1900 U.S. population but 78 percent of the nation’s top scientists. Today, these metropolitan areas account for 24 percent of the U.S. population and 42 percent of U.S. patents. READ MORE >>

For the first time since World War II, there are fewer jobs three years after the end of a recession than before it began. Our new Brookings report suggests that most of this flat recovery can be attributed to severe losses in housing wealth and jobs in industries such as manufacturing and construction. Yet education--especially the balance between the demand and supply of educated workers--is the most important factor explaining long-run unemployment in metropolitan and national labor markets. READ MORE >>