Events

That the President hasn't condemned Russian interference in American politics demonstrates how unfit for office he and his associates are. Because Russian interference has real consequences. Via TPM, the Russians have had extraordinary success dividing Americans through social media: Last year, two Russian Facebook pages organized dueling rallies in front of the Islamic Da’wah Center of Houston, according to information released by U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. Heart of Texas, a...

Jeet Heer thinks it's about time to confront the history of our greatest failure in light of recent events: At the end of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, which aired on TV in 1990, the historian Barbara Fields says “the Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought and regrettably it can still be lost.” This is hard to deny: That war still shapes the basic contours of American politics. The heartland of the American conservatism is the old Confederacy. Figures like Robert E. Lee are still the...

I'm just going to link to this post from April 2011. (4/20 no less.) Sigh.

An MLS student in Portland, Ore., wants you to understand that even though you don't personally use them, libraries are thriving: Today, depending on the community they serve, a public librarian is part educator, part social worker, and part Human Google. What they aren’t is a living anachronism, an out-of-touch holdout in a dying job who’s consigned to a desk, scolding kids for returning books a few days late. An urban librarian in a struggling neighborhood, like Chera Kowalski in Philadelphia’s...

It's hard to believe, but if you're trying to use public transit to get to an airport, you might want to use Bing Maps instead of Google: Instead of advising you to take one of the “Airporter” buses from San Francisco International Airport, Oakland International Airport, and San Jose International Airport to the north and south of the Bay Area, the app will propose a two- or three-step odyssey on Bay Area Rapid Transit rail and then local buses. As Google describes things, putting those city-to-terminal...

President Trump's approval ratings have fallen to the lowest in his presidency: Thirty eight percent of Americans say they approve of Trump’s job performance — down five points since September — while 58 percent disapprove. Trump’s previous low in approval in the national NBC/WSJ poll was 39 percent back in May. The drop for Trump has come from independents (who shifted from 41 percent approval in September to 34 percent now), whites (who went from 51 percent to 47 percent) and whites without a college...

While Catalonia starts a civil war in Spain, and glaciers in the Antarctic advance more and more rapidly each year, it's good to know that Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks can agree on something. Sullivan: "This is what the Trump abyss looks like." Brooks: "This is the week Trump won." It's not really that bad. But it sure feels like it.

The Pew Research Center just released a massive study of American political attitudes: The political typology reveals that even in a political landscape increasingly fractured by partisanship, the divisions within the Republican and Democratic coalitions may be as important a factor in American politics as the divisions between them. In some cases these fissures are not new – they were evident in six previous Pew Research Center typology studies conducted over the past three decades, most recently in...

I made sure to take a photo of this while walking home from dinner last night: But, really, the sign should now say AC000101. Because the Cubs lost the playoffs. Again.

After traveling last week and the week before for my current project, we've now spent five solid days workshopping all the stuff we learned. It's a lot. We covered three walls and four windows in a 3 x 4 meter conference room with post-its, and today we've shuffled them around twice. It's kind of exhausting, but also a comprehensive way of sharing a ton of data quickly. All of this is by the way of saying I won't actually read a newspaper until tonight or tomorrow morning.