Courts take another look at the cold science of gerrymandering

January 29, 2018, 7:01 pm/2 Comments

Gerrymandering was once a kind of artisanal branch of politics. The late U.S. Rep. Phil Burton was said to have single-handedly redrawn the 1970 congressional map of California armed with nothing more than a stack of telephone books and his encyclopedic knowledge of the political landscape of his state. But computerization has turned it into a cold science. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court will try again to decide when gerrymandering goes too far.

Read more →

The world as seen from Nollywood is different from Donald Trump’s

January 15, 2018, 3:51 pm/3 Comments

Stuck in a middle-row seat on a flight from Johannesburg to London last year, I watched my first Nollywood movie, “30 Days in Atlanta.” It came to mind last week in the uproar over President Trump’s scatological remarks about the countries we were flying over.

Nollywood is the nickname for Nigeria’s boisterous film scene, which thrives on low-budget, madcap romantic comedies like “30 Days in Atlanta.” The movie’s about an unpolished bumpkin named Akpos and his more urbane cousin, an IT specialist, who win a 30-day trip to Atlanta at a party for the opening of a fancy new real estate development in Lagos. Ayo Makun, who plays Akpos, also produced the film, which was a box office smash across much of Africa.

Read more →

The new year dawns with the first salvos of Culture War Two

January 8, 2018, 6:25 pm/0 Comments

For a few crystalline moments in Atlanta Monday night, opposite poles of our tightly stretched American culture, the tweeter Donald Trump and the rapper Kendrick Lamar, came into rare convergence, for a game that under other circumstances you figure neither would have understood or cared about. The verbal stabs of rapping and tweeting, Trump style, have a lot in common, but they speak to opposite sides of the divide which has absorbed so much political energy over the past few decades.

Read more →

Tax reform in the time of crypto currencies

November 27, 2017, 6:32 pm/0 Comments

Here’s a startling and largely unreported development which tells us a lot, indirectly, about what’s going down this week in Washington on tax reform. This year, investors have put more money into the initial offerings for crypto currencies than they have into all the initial public offerings for U.S. companies that came onto the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ.

Read more →

For Atlantic Coast states, sea level politics are rising fast

October 30, 2017, 6:01 pm/1 Comment

Climate change is a global problem, but for the states of the Atlantic Coast, the rising sea level is a particular problem. But the politics around the issue still teeter on a seesaw between the willingness to ignore the problem and the urgency of finding a way to pay for the solution.

Last week, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster became the latest in a rising tide of politicians united in their denial of, well, the rising tide.

Read more →

Orthodoxy is the easy way in early governor’s race forums

October 9, 2017, 5:59 pm/0 Comments

Over the past week or so both the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor have met to air their differences, and it should come as a surprise to no one that they don’t have many.

Sure, the two Staceys jabbed at each other over a couple of points and all the Republican challengers accused their better known rivals of being career politicians, But the overriding impression from this first pair of encounters is that both parties have grown settled in their respective orthodoxies, with very little way for candidates to break new ground.

Read more →