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The Living Room War was launched this week—the ferocious bombardment of attack ads that will make turning on a television in an up-for-grabs state like Ohio a high-risk, wear-a-metal-helmet venture for the next 25 weeks until Election Day. But to cover the biggest TV advertising blitz in American political history smartly and to understand its strategic implications, reporters and...

Jack Kaminsky lives with his mother now. He is 63 years old, broad shouldered, with silver hair and a silver beard. He's the circulation director of The Joplin Globe, and he and his wife survived the tornado that blew apart their city last May 22 by diving into their basement and listening to “everything fall apart.”...

USA Today sees an oily, gassy rainbow on America’s energy horizon. “Energy independence isn’t just a pipe dream,” read a large, bold headline on Wednesday’s front. It was draped over an image of oil drums stamped “Made in USA,” laid out like bowling pins in front the US flag. The nearly 2,000-word cover story, by Tim Mullaney,...

NORTH CAROLINA — Last week, North Carolina voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment One to the state constitution, defining marriage as between one man and one woman only. The May 8 vote—coming a day before President Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage—produced renewed national debate about gay marriage as well as jokes portraying this state as backwards. Amendment One...

In March 2011, Lisa M. Hamilton, a writer and photographer, began a series of road trips around rural California. She had a grant from the Creative Work Fund—a San Francisco-based foundation that supports collaboration between artists and nonprofits—to tell stories that would help bridge the cultural divide between the rural and urban parts of the state. Initially she...

Conor Friedersdorf makes a nice catch on Tom Friedman's Sunday column bemoaning the commercialization of seemingly all aspects of American life: For example, his column is bizarrely titled, "This Column Is Not Sponsored by Anyone," despite the fact that right above it on NYTimes.com there is a banner ad for a Citi/American Airlines credit card. But Friedersdorf...

Time touched a nerve this week with its provocative cover photo of 26-year-old Jamie Lynne Grumet and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair next to her, nursing her left breast while both stare directly (and unapologetically) at readers. The underlying story focused on the “attachment parenting” method developed by Dr. William Sears, which...

Long before Facebook or Foursquare, men like the late management consultant Martin Jay Levitt were connoisseurs of social networks. At the beginning of each new gig Levitt would have a client’s human resources director create detailed diagrams mapping the relationships between all employees, accounting for gossip, date of hire and pay, even details of his sex life, if any...

The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—And Hold—The White House | By Samuel L. Popkin | Oxford University Press | 350 pages, $27.95 Academic political science and Washington policymaking once had a close relationship: during the Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, for example. No longer. As Karl Rove writes as a blurb on this book, most contemporary political science...

In what FT Alphaville called "the most excruciating bank conference call we’ve ever heard," press favorite Jamie Dimon announced last week that JPMorgan Chase has lost more than $2 billion on bad derivatives bets made by its chief investment office. It could (meaning, it probably will) lose more than that. On Thursday, we were told up to another...

Early on a February morning, in a glass-walled conference room high up in the Hearst Tower in Manhattan, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe spoke in a careful, reassuring tone. “We can do this; I know that we can do this,” he told the audience, which included representatives from magazine-industry heavyweights like Condé Nast, Hearst, and Time Inc. “Hang in there...

CJR has been writing since late last year about a proposed FCC rule that would require local TV stations to post their public records of political ad sales on the Internet. So with the new rule announced in late April and set to go into effect soon, we were delighted to team up with the folks at Poynter Friday afternoon...