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Romney Had No Clue as to Obama Ground Game

…n Ohio. And eavesdropped on an Obama canvasser. I mean, I spent 45 minutes phone-banking the parking garage of a lowly San Diego field office with four children under nine years old hopped up on Doritos and doing laps around my folding chair, and even under those suboptimal circumstances I could tell right away that Obama’s data was even better than it was in 2008 and that there was hardcore focus on the 18- to 29-year-old set. And, mind you, I’m…

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A Faith-Based Opportunity for Obama

…ng of the country.” In 2010, the White House refused to comment on DuBois’ phone call to religious right ideologue David Jeremiah after the latter called the president “a dangerous person” moving the country toward “socialism.” It was obviously an incident the White House would have preferred DuBois just let go. Boorstein’s piece suggests that some critics believe that the office would have performed better had DuBois been more experienced and the…

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Becoming Forever Lonesome: How Violence Changes Us

…ued until nightfall. They continued until counselors and nuns in habits outnumbered wild-eyed parents. Then some guy came over and asked for identifying information about their children—jewelry, tattoos, dental records. Two women went outside and threw up. A man who was shot while watching the premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado this July remembers that he was sitting in the fifth row of the theater. When the theater filled with s…

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Church Uses Facebook for Sacramental Scrutiny at its Peril

…tersects the Church’s medieval sacramental structure.  In 2011, a new smartphone app aimed to support preparation for and the practice of confession ended up generating more confusion than contrition when a not particularly social design invited people to conclude that absolution was granted by way of the Confession app itself rather than, according to Catholic teaching, through the mediation of the priest. No wonder Pope Benedict XVI’s Message fo…

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Electionpocalypse, Part I (Christianity)

…r every single baby legally aborted God will require the blood of the same number of people, which is between 30-50 million Americans!” he writes. (NB: this “pro-life” position bears more of a relationship to a book on numerology than the Book of Numbers.) Anti-marriage equality crusader Bishop Harry Jackson, who is African American, urges readers to vote for Romney “as a statement of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.” While King was sitting in the…

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Escape From Manhattan: Tech, Tragedy and Storytelling in Sandy’s Wake

…obody can deny the convenience of ready access to information, maps, phone numbers, calendars, and social satisfaction that our reliance on technology provides. Technology is a tool, right? It doesn’t change who we are, right? It doesn’t blind us—it reveals reality by connecting us and showing us the world via our screens… right? Look, I know that our new imaginative, mediated work is doing good. I know people can feel a real sense of empowerment…

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Safety Not Guaranteed

…ing up. The narrow stairway of our fifth story walk-up is pitch black. Our phones have no signal, which means no AP alerts, no Facebook, no Twitter—and no way to contact friends and family. Except for the radio, we’re cut off. And so is everyone else in the mass of humanity that lives and works below 39th Street. In the afternoon, after the worst of Sandy has departed for the north, I walk across Avenue B again into the Red zone. Some time during…

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A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?

…to Wal-Mart, ate pizza in their hotel rooms, spent hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them—the ones who would talk to me, anyway—over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed. I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative….

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Lincoln, Clinton, and Trump: From Strategy to Spin to Straight-Up Bullshit

…ned to create an alternative universe in which memories of the past are discredited and new “facts” are concocted wholesale to replace them. Trump does tell big lies. Among the most egregious is his claim that the “birther” conspiracy theory was originally Clinton’s doing, and that he deserves the credit for putting it to rest by compelling Obama to produce his birth certificate. Whereas a pluralist politics of countervailing spin, fibs, and occas…

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The Irony of Moral Panic over Surplus Men

…rrots”: The carrots would include a large wage subsidy and a per-child tax credit and a substantial corporate tax cut and an employer-side payroll tax holiday to encourage hiring. They would also include an infrastructure bill written to include a certain amount of make-work spending and in increase in government hiring in traditionally-male fields.. There are some obvious problems with Douthat’s prescription beyond its admitted looseness. As the…

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