I voted today in two separate elections in two separate continents. So that’s “often.” Both election days are also in the future, so that’s “early.” So hooray for me for getting my democracy on. The first election was, rather obviously, the US election. I’m still registered in Massachusetts, so I had to send a letter [...]
When I came to the center yesterday, it was clear that I had rolled in via Vélib’. “Be careful tomorrow with Vélib’,” one instructor warned me, because today’s general strike will make the bicycles extremely valuable. With at least the RER B scheduled to be out of commission, it’s entirely possible that I would have [...]
Continue reading about Are grass’s roots that much more impressive than trees’?
When the Awl complains that this has been a miserable American summer, they’re mostly right, but it hasn’t been exactly a great summer in France, either. Sarkozy has decided to kick off the 2012 presidential campaign extra early by re-burnishing his xenophobic credentials, angling to get the support of the far-right Front National types–the very [...]
Continue reading about Mechanical reproduction of la manif and the Tea Party
About a month ago, I quit Facebook. I didn’t delete my account, nor do I never log in; I have obligations that keep me returning to the site (namely in the form of having people use the message feature to contact me–people whose email addresses I don’t have). But I don’t write on walls, poke, [...]
Last year while speaking to a professor about Obama, she mentioned that she had been collecting “flair” pertaining to Obama, and I somehow immediately understood that to mean either real, true baubles or buttons pertaining to the man (like those I continue to see daily on my commute), or, rather, Obama-themed “pieces of flair” from [...]
I started this post two weeks ago exactly, but just as I was trying to get my thoughts about Obama straight–or, more precisely, my thoughts about why I felt how I did about his election–I saw a poster for an event hosted by 3CT on “The Event of Obama.” So I decided to hold off [...]
Continue reading about The Event of Obama, and why ambivalence is good
(This is how I spent GIS Day) I was surprised in my previous post by how young and black Louisiana was (in 2000), yet how not for Obama it went. Only 10 of 64 parishes were carried by the Democrat, though they included three of the four most populous parishes. I wondered if maybe there [...]
[I massively updated the middle part of this post after thinking about it on the ride home] I was pretty startled by the two maps I saw at Strange Maps over the weekend. They showed a distinct correlation between cotton production in 1860 and Obama support in 2008. Where more cotton was picked 150 years [...]
Well, it turns out that my concerns about the turnout in my previous post are now totally wrong. Nate shows today that Obama beat Kerry in pretty much every demographic, and in some he beat him by double digits. Considering that more people voted, period, than in 2004, it follows that more of each demographic [...]
I wrote a post for Daily Kos about my feelings about the election, or, well, about how people are reacting to it. I really don’t see the same level of change that everyone else does. I’m not pessimistic or anything, but I think that the optimism (or whatever) is a bit… overdone. Anyway, it’s looking [...]