American politics & culture

Updated February 16, 2014

Want another way to learn about politics?

Check out these short, clear, pithy videos on various aspects of American politics by CGPGrey:

• Primary elections explained
• How the electoral college works
• The trouble with the electoral college
• Mixed-member proportional representation (not how we do this in the US, but in the mix in electoral reform)
• The problem with first past the post explained
• The alternative vote explained
• Gerrymandering explained

You can find even more of his videos on Grey’s Blog—including an explanation on Santa!

~~~

This isn’t a history website, but there are bits and pieces of American history that are absolutely worth noting, especially those dealing with the long march to include everyone in the promise which begins We the people. . . .

Thus, various sites on civil rights & liberation of all kinds, with links to key documents within:

• Civil Rights Movement Veterans
• CRMV, Jeff Schwartz explains Louisiana literacy tests
• ACT-UP Oral History Project

And here’s the Racial Dot Map, based on the 2010 census. It takes a long time to load, but once it does, you can zoom in to get a pretty close shot of your (or any) neighborhood. (Further explanation of the Racial Dot Map here.)

~~~

Given the role of the economy in our political culture, here are a few articles and sites that address those political-economic issues.

Also, you’ll note all of the links running down the right side of the page, many of which are related to American politics; check them out, and if you have any good sources which you don’t see here, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll add ’em.

• Monica Potts, What’s Killing Poor White Women? American Prospect, 9.3.13
• Alexandra Fuller, In the Shadow of Wounded Knee, National Geographic, Aug 2012
• Brandon Keim, Greed Isn’t Good: Wealth Could Make People Unethical, Wired, Feb 27, 2012
• Laura McKenna, Explaining Annette Lareau, or, Why Parenting Style Ensures Inequality, The Atlantic, Feb 16, 2012
• Binyamen Appelbaum & Robert Gebeloff, Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Rely on It, New York Times, Feb 11, 2012 (be sure to click on the various links within)
• Timothy Noah, The United States of Inequality, Slate series, Fall 2010
• Paul Krugman, Who Was Milton Friedman? New York Review of Books, Feb 15, 2007

Blogs on political science, by political scientists (& those who take pol sci seriously)

• Jonathan Bernstein, a plain blog about politics
• Frontloading HQ
• GovBeat
• Mischiefs of Faction
• The Monkey Cage
• Politify
• Riding the Tiger, The Miller Center
• Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight (to be updated when established at ESPN)
• Votamatic (Drew Linzer)
• WonkBlog

Blogs/sites on politics and culture:

• Arts & Letters Daily
• Bleeding Heart Libertarians
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
• Democracy in America, The Economist
• Rod Dreher, The American Conservative
• James Fallows, The Atlantic
• Corey Robin
• Alyssa Rosenberg, ThinkProgess
• Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish

Blogs/sites on economics & political economy:

• Brad DeLong
• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Center for Economic and Policy Research (Mark Weisbrot & Dean Baker)
• Economic Policy Institute, Working Economics
• Equality of Opportunity Project
• Federal Reserve
  • Economic Research and Data
• Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal
• Manhattan Institute
• Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok)
• Rortybomb (Mike Konczal)
• Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion
• Tax Council Policy Institute
• Urban Institute & Brookings Institute Tax Policy Center
• Matthew Yglesias, Moneybox