Now that Hillary Clinton has more or less officially lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, everyone wants to give their two bits about where she went wrong and he went right. What interests me, though, is how little attention, comparatively speaking, has been paid to the role that their supporters' relative fluency in so-called "New Media" has played in their respective campaigns. Although Hillary started out wanting to present herself as a sequel to her husband in the technology sector and had never fashioned herself a resister to the virtual life that an increasing number of people around the world lead on the internet, she ended up discovering a target market among precisely those Americans who, even if they do spend time online, are too busy and/or too attached to older modes of being to make it their home away from home. Indeed, a sizable percentage of her most zealous backers seem to be the sort of people who feel themselves to be homeless in that context.

Obama, on the other hand, made full use of the path that Howard Dean's 2004 campaign had started breaking before its machete became prematurely dull. He was able to outflank Clinton by securing an unprecedented number and quantity of online donations from individuals and by taking advantage of the new alternative press, otherwise known as the enemy of professional journalists everywhere, the volunteer army of the blogging multitude. That part of the story has, of course, been duly reported by those jouralists...

After a series of mishaps Friday morning I suddenly had the urge to compensate for my frustration. Stopping for a coffee and scone was already on my agenda, but I wanted more. Near Raging Sage, my favorite café here in Tucson, is a store called R-Galaxy that specializes in anime, manga, and traditional Western comics. I have always enjoyed spending time there because it's nerdy fan vibe is so different from what you experience in chain stores. Tucson has a lot of places like that, in fact, one of the main reasons, aside from the spectacular and unique Sonoran landscape that surrounds the city, that it can be an inspiring place to live despite the fact that there seems to be a Walgreen's on every other block. I needed an alternative culture fix in other words.

As I approached the store, though, I saw the metal covers were still pulled down over its windows and doors. I checked the clock in the car. 10:15am. I was sure that R-Galaxy opened at 10am. So sure, in fact, that I was afraid to park and find out for sure. You see, in the few seconds after I had determined that the place should have been opened but wasn't, I had concluded that it must be yet another casualty of the current economic downturn in the United States. Not that I had any particular reason to have reached that conclusion. Every time I had been inside in R-Galaxy I'd had the...

In the weeks leading up to yesterday’s Russian elections, the American media was full of stories reflecting on Vladimir Putin’s years as President. Whether focusing on the inner sanctum of the Kremlin or its influence on Russian’s hinterlands, these reports repeatedly underscored both the nation’s increasingly authoritarian government and its increasingly robust economy. More often than not, the portrait of this new Russia was shaded with a mixture of regret and fear. What happened to the previous decade’s dream of a Russia comfortably integrated into the West?

The compartmentalization of the mainstream news in the United States and its longstanding reluctance to waste words on historical interpretation makes it difficult for even a highly educated reader to confront this question directly. For better or worse – more the latter, of late, if the crisis in the nation’s housing market is any indication – Americans live in the now at the expense of both the past and future. As a consequence, some of the most prescient analyses of the United States come in displaced forms, particularly its popular culture.

Although academics who devote lengthy treatises to the analysis of television programs like 24 are frequently ridiculed for devoting their energy to entertainment instead of more serious topics, they have the right idea even when they use the wrong tools – self-important rhetoric, needlessly specialized terminology – to convey it. For it is patently clear to anyone who confronts contemporary American politics without prejudice that the country’s popular culture facilitates thought...

Yesterday, when I went to pick my nine-year-old daughter up from school, she was hanging out in the classroom of her favorite teacher, whom she had last year and the year before. We noticed that one of the walls was covered with the self-portrait masks the teacher's current students had made, just like my daughter did last year, all of them surrounding a world map. The point, as I recall the project, is to connect self-perception with broader social characteristics, locating individuals in relation to their family's past as well as its present. A noble undertaking, reflective of the positive outlook on immigration that has been a huge part of American history. "The Statue of Liberty and all that," as a friend of mine once said.

These days, though, it's hard to look at this sort of project, particularly where I live in Southern Arizona, without a feeling of melancholy. All too often, the openness to the world that Americans continue to tout as the nation's greatest virtue goes hand in hand with the desire to close the door on immigration from Mexico. We may celebrate diversity, but we prefer to keep it a safe distance, whether by space or time. At this point, it's usually alright for one's family to have come from elsewhere, even Mexico, provided that it wasn't too recently. And places thousands of miles away are deemed "interesting," whereas locations just across the border, which is only an hour's drive from my home in Tucson, are...

An underdog Democratic politician demonstrates the danger in presuming that the party's nominee for President is a done deal. Despite beginning with many of the most powerful people in Washington on his opponent's side, his campaign generates a remarkable groundswell of grassroots support, calling the wisdom of party insiders in the Democratic National Committee into question. Suddenly people who never thought of donating money to a candidate because they have little to give are realizing that, when enough little people contribute, the big people seem to diminish in size. It's like something from a Frank Capra movie, only its happening in the Computer Age. The American Left, though rightfully suspicious of anything that happens under the auspices of the party that has rejected its concerns again and again, starts to believe again in the mainstream political process. The prospect of removing President Bush is palpable. All over the country, individuals who had sworn they wouldn't be fooled again are fired up by the conviction that they can make a difference after all . Hope is back in a big way.

The year is 1992. And the candidate responsible for this excitement, which will linger into November even though he has left the stage, is Jerry Brown.

The man once known as "Governor Moonbeam," when he presided over California in the 1970s, emerged from the political wilderness that year as the prophet for a progressive populism recalling the years of the Great Depression. By insisting that all of his campaign...