The New Republic

Last Sunday night in Seattle, in the midst of a marquee matchup, the San Francisco 49ers began marching down the field in the first quarter, trailing the Seahawks 14-0. On Seattle’s 20 on third down, quarterback Colin Kaepernick found his one-time Pro Bowl tight end, Vernon Davis, on the sideline inside the 5. After the ball arrived but before Davis could fully hold onto it, Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor jetted in and with full force used his shoulder to knock Davis’ chest, sending the ball flying irrelevantly away. Almost immediately, two yellow flags—from two nearby referees—flew in. The call: unnecessary roughness on Chancellor. The result: 10-yard penalty, first-and-ten Niners on the 10-yard-line. There are two more things to know about the play. One is that Davis sustained a concussion. Two is that Chancellor’s hit was almost certainly not against the rules. Mike Pereira, the NFL’s one-time senior director of officiating who now works as a commentator for Fox, tweeted, “The hit turns out to be legal.” Cris Collinsworth, NBC’s color commentator, was even more stark: after looking at the replay, he observed of Chancellor, “Lowered his head. Hit him with the shoulder pad. Get the head out of there. If that’s not legal I don’t know what is. I think that is outstanding defensive football.”  READ MORE >>

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Seattle, WA—Some 6.8 million Americans awoke today confident that their state is not only the most progressive in the nation, but even more so than Canada and Amsterdam. That’s because, while Colorado voters legalized pot and Maine and Maryland voters approved gay marriage yesterday, Washingtonians accomplished both feats with two historic ballot measures that cemented the liberal-utopian reputation of this upper-left corner of the continental United States. READ MORE >>

After Justin Bieber’s calumny against Tacoma this week, the Puget Sound could use some props. READ MORE >>

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 >>

What explains the wide range of economic growth and prosperity across U.S. regions, and why is it so hard for struggling metro areas to reverse multi-decade trends? These are the questions that urban economist Enrico Moretti addresses in The New Geography of Jobs. In his vision, innovative workers and companies create prosperity that flows broadly, but these gains are mostly metropolitan in scale, meaning that geography substantially determines economic vitality. READ MORE >>

LATE ON THE MORNING of July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart climbed into the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra airplane on a small grass runway in Lae, New Guinea. She was 22,000 flight miles into her daring attempt to fly around the world, a journey that had captivated Americans since she lifted off from Miami a month earlier. Now Earhart was facing the most dangerous leg of the trip: a 19-hour, 2,556-mile flight to a tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean known as Howland Island. READ MORE >>

Across the street from my home in Mount Rainier, Maryland, is a white three-story house with a wooden sign hanging next to its front door that reads, “NEW WAYS MINISTRY.” The house is among the quietest on the block, with its blinds drawn nearly all year round. Its residents are a couple of very friendly Catholic nuns and a quarrelsome pair of cats. READ MORE >>

Wow, the Mob really is dead. For years we’ve heard that the decline of omertà, the disappearance of mom-and-pop retail, and the erosion of socially cohesive Italian-American neighborhoods were killing off the Mafia. It was the upside to the evisceration of community structures documented in books like Bowling Alone. READ MORE >>

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