Simon van Zuylen-Wood

John Sununu recently told CNN that Colin Powell only endorsed President Obama out of racial solidarity. Implied in his comments is the conservative trope that Obama is something of an ‘affirmative action president.’ Both viewpoints rely on the same morsel of logic: He only got here because he’s black. The affirmative-action argument is all over […]

While we’re on the topic of football, some news from the darker side of the sport. A brand new survey out of Massachusetts, prompted by a 2010 state law, found that 3,000 youth athletes from 164 schools suffered concussions last year. (A revelation that comes on the heels of a five-concussion peewee football game in […]

On Thursday, Kevin Drum pointed to a recent study (via Tyler Cowen) that found that college football games taking place 10 days before the election had the power to sway voters. When high-profile, Division I home teams won, incumbents received 2.57% more of the local vote share than if they lost, feeling more or less […]

During President Obama’s off-again, on-again, interview relationship with the Des Moines Register this week, I couldn’t help but wonder why the brouhaha was making news. (Well, one reason was clear: journalists tend to think the opinions of other journalists are worth writing about.) Like the media’s insistence upon covering the shifting time slots of late-night […]

Born in 1942 to a middle-class Jewish household, he earned an Ivy League degree in 1966, and rose to prominence in the mid-80s, transforming an industry from his New York City throne. When he steps down in 2014, he will have served as long as any man who had held his post before him. If […]

Continuing my habit of blogging about trials taking place on the Italian mainland, let us all now have mixed feelings about yesterday’s news that former Prime Minister Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi has been sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud. Il Cavaliere’s sentence, handed down a year after he resigned from office, feels […]

What do Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis, Maryland Congressman John Sarbanes, Walmart Foundation President Sylvia Mathews Burwell, and Washington Monthly Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris have in common? They’re all Greek Americans and they’re getting together today at Georgetown. Beginning around 11:30AM, Paul will moderate a discussion on “The Next Generation of Giving Back,” about public service […]

Forget momentum. Forget polling averages. Heck, forget Nate Silver for a minute of your lives. (I’m asking you to do a lot of forgetting today.) Just think about odds for a minute. All things equal, says Gabriel Snyder at the Atlantic Wire, Obama has an 82.4% chance of winning the presidency. Conceding that there are […]

There’s a whiff of a possibility that in ten days President Obama wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote, as George W. Bush did in 2000. If he does, the conservative outcry to abolish the electoral college will likely be faint. Long-run demographics favor Democrats right now; it makes sense for Republicans to […]

“Oh Sandy the aurora is risin’ behind us The pier lights our carnival life on the water”