There has been no shortage of map-based predictions of this year’s election, with all eyes on the 95-odd tossup electors, especially the ones in Ohio and Florida. One of the more interesting takes has been the map center at PBS.org, which lets you compare solid and swing states against demographic data (their Patchwork Nation map series is also really worth checking out). But David Sparks, a Duke political scientist, has a more fine-tuned approach. Almost all election maps, he realized, were choropleth, meaning only differences between states or counties could be shown. An isarthmic map, on the other hand, allows you to see gradations and contours that don’t necessarily fall into concrete political boundaries.

So Sparks created an isarthmic election map—quite possibly the first of its kind—which lets us see the informal political boundaries that simpler maps often miss. What’s more, he created a time-lapse of presidential returns from 1920 to 2008, which gives us a dramatic portrait of how our political landscape changed over much of the last century. You can see it here, on Ecopolitology. What stands out more than anything is just how solid the South has almost always been, whether as staunch Dixiecrats before the Civil Rights Act, or as a reliable GOP base since Nixon. It also illustrates the huge, long-term changes that accompanied elections like 1932, 1960, and 1980—and of course 2008.

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Wasn’t this in Russia? Yanko Tsvetkov’s amusing Mapping Stereotypes project on Brain Pickings explores the world through the unforgiving eyes of Russians, Americans, and a few others. You can check out the rest on Tsvetkov’s blog. One of the best is Asia According to Americans, with Central Asia divided between “WTF-stan,” “Vietnam 2.0,” and “Borat.”

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Maps have also been a big part of this year’s climate change debate. NASA’s Arctic melt imagery seems to be everywhere this summer, along with equally foreboding graphics like this one from the U.S. Drought Monitor. A little more optimistically, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has devised a series of maps showing the nation’s best hotspots for renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal, available at Grist. The upshot seems to be that Americans west of the Mississippi have the greatest potential to develop sustainable energy, whether it’s wind farms in the Great Plains, solar in the Southwest, or geothermal in the Mountain States.

And a little less optimistically, the Center for Global Development has mapped where the worst effects of climate change are likely to strike, from severe weather to sea level rise, to famine. The results are kind of what experts have been saying for a while now: while the U.S. may see more extreme weather, the biggest overall risks remain in the Global South, especially sub-Saharan Africa. A key challenge for Northern countries may be how to respond to humanitarian crises and disasters that are likely to erupt in the Third World.

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What if our maps are wrong? In cities with a lot public transit, official maps of the subway or train systems are almost always distorted, says Smithsonian Magazine. Usually that means making downtown way too big, which is what Chicago and San Francisco do. But in some cities, like London and New York, the errors go a step further, putting streets in the wrong place and misplacing intersections. Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, for instance, is completely out of whack, says Smithsonian. OK, so how much does it all matter? Apparently a lot. Distorted maps influence people’s commutes and rides, and might even get them lost. So much for efficiency.

Image by Kieran Lynam, licensed under Creative Commons.  

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It’s an unfortunate fact that many Global South countries depend on fossil fuels for economic survival. But Ecuador has found an innovative solution, says Audubon. The Quito government knows full well that its Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini oilfields are worth billions, but the fields are also sitting on Yasuní National Park. And the Amazonian park has treasures of its own, including a full 20 percent of world bird species and more tree varieties than all of North America. So, President Correa has proposed a bargain: if the rest of the world can pony up a (small) percentage of the oilfields’ lost revenue by 2024, they won’t drill. The proposal may add up to blackmail, but major players are already heavily involved, including the German government and the UN. The upshot could be a protected forest and an empowered Third World economy. 

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Understanding Rem Koolhaas’ satirical architecture: from the “setback” New York office building to the “crumbling” Bangkok high-rise, Koolhaas’ largely unbuilt designs disrupt expectations and lend common forms a shade of irony, says Smithsonian Magazine. There’s even an occasional anti-corporate message. One proposal for a Paris office block includes a single floor jutting away from rest of the tower, complete with subversive billboard signs such as ne jamais travailler, or “never work.”

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It’s not easy to catch some civil discourse these days, but it’s still out there. Check out Treehugger’s list of “26 Things We Can All Agree On” (with pictures!), mostly having to do with the environmental crisis. It’s a lot of no-brainers—“Every kid should have the opportunity to climb a tree,” “Tap water shouldn’t catch on fire”—but that’s the point. The sooner we realize most of us see eye to eye on things like, “Kids need healthy food,” the better.

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President Obama may be ahead in national polls, but that doesn’t change the Democrats’ deeper demography problems, says Jack Metzger in Working Class Perspectives. Like most Democrats, Obama did very well among minorities and women in 2008, winning the nonwhite vote by a full 60 percentage points. But also like previous elections, 2012 will likely come down to working class whites—and probably males. In that group, the Dems have a lousy record. Such a crude classification of American society is unfortunate, says Metzger, but the fact is that if the Republicans can edge out just 5 percent of the white working class from 2008, Romney’s headed for the White House. And in 2008, those white working class voters made up a majority in battleground states like Ohio and Iowa. The solution? The Democrats need to stop thinking in stereotypes, Metzger argues, and maybe—just maybe—stop calling everyone “middle class.”

Not to mention the fact that the middle class itself is changing faster than pollsters seem to realize. Should the Democrats venture far beyond Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium during the DNC next month, they might catch a glimpse of what local photographer Nancy Pierce has recently documented. There, once-booming exurbs have been transformed into ghost towns, says Streetsblog’s Angie Smith. We’ve known about exurban decline for a while now, Smith adds, but Pierce’s photography is still a powerful and surreal portrait of decay—and naturally poignant as the city plans to soon host the biggest political shindig of the year.  

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And don’t miss Democracy Now’s moving remembrance of Howard Zinn, who died two years ago at the age of 87. Zinn would have been 90 today, and to celebrate his birthday Democracy Now has posted a 2009 interview in which Zinn discussed honesty, history, and the power of ordinary people. And of course his message of standing up to injustice and falsehood is resonant as ever. 
 

A periander metalmark butterfly in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park. Image by Geoff Gallice, licensed under Creative Commons.     

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“A science fiction fantasy from the sixties with a view to the sea.” We tend to forget about the Olympics once they’re over, but the games often leave behind quite a lot. In a series of vignettes in Granta, writers living in Beijing, Athens, and elsewhere recall the changes the Olympics brought to their communities, and what remains of the spectacle. “I happen to live in the Olympic neighborhood, built twenty years ago for the games,” says Santiago Roncagliolo, from Barcelona. “This is the point where past meets present, and you wonder which is the real one. I still have no answer.”

And check out this Sociological Images post on “the life of Olympic infrastructure once all the spectators pack up and go home,” from John Pack and Gary Hustwit’s Olympic City Project. 

One thing that’s clear about post-Olympic London, however: “the gloves come off,” says Dave Zirin in Edge of Sports (thanks, ZNet). International spectacle could hardly distract many Londoners from a crumbling economy, harsh austerity, and a blossoming national security state, and London politics are about to get messy. What will the city remember 20 years from now?

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Video: The Center for Investigative Journalism takes on industrial ag in The Hidden Cost of Hamburgers, a new animated short (reposted by Civil Eats). Bottom line: beef is a big rip-off. For every ounce of beef that’s made, a pound of greenhouse gases are also produced. And that says nothing for other externalized costs, like health risks, water pollution, and mistreatment of workers, to name a few. Oh, and we’re addicted to it.

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From Colossal: Recreating Van Gogh masterpieces with colored newsprint and pieces of wood.  

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Climate change has been the forefront of a lot of people’s minds this summer, along with a lot of very difficult questions about our role in confronting crisis and adapting to change. But for Sarah Gilman, one of the biggest questions is how to deal with a loss of this magnitude. Writing in High Country News, she wonders how we “grasp the obliteration of so much we have known and loved,” as we move very quickly from world to another entirely different one. Reflecting on creative responses like Maya Lin’s “What is missing” project, Gilman’s own answer points toward the future. “Looking forward, grieving for what has been,” she says, “we must remember that loss is not new to the world, and that loss is also possibility.”

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President Obama may have put the kibosh on Keystone XL, but that didn’t stop TransCanada from trying to make it happen in smaller pieces, especially in the southern plains. But activists in Texas have no intention of letting that happen, says Forrest Wilder in The Texas Observer. Construction on the pipeline could begin very soon, which is why Tar Sands Blockade got into gear on Thursday with “a sustained campaign of civil disobedience” to block the project in East Texas. Dozens of people have signed on, marking a new chapter in what Wilder calls “one of the biggest environmental fights of our time."  

The blockade in Texas makes a powerful statement, says Bill McKibben in Think Progress (via Grist), and invokes the civil disobedience last year that eventually spurred action from Washington. What’s more, the actions come at an appropriate time, as similar protests have erupted in places like West Virginia, Montana, and the Pacific Northwest over coal exports and mining. The fight over Keystone XL united a lot of disparate groups of people last year, says McKibben, and that can happen again.  

Image by Kiko Alario Salom, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Remember back in 2009 when Texas Gov. Rick Perry almost-but-not-quite said his state should secede from the union? The small media blitz that followed dramatically illustrated that even in the 21^st century, the South retains a good deal of its separateness, and its bad rap among Northerners. After all, America’s most populous region was the last holdout for slavery and segregation. And among many Northern liberals, the South’s recent recasting as the low-wage, anti-union Sunbelt hasn’t helped its standing. The solution? Let them go, says writer Chuck Thompson, who’s written a tongue-in-cheek book arguing for southern secession. The upshot, says Thompson in an interview with AlterNet, would be a mutual breakup, hopefully without all the fuss of a civil war. Oh, and they can take Utah.

And speaking of culture wars, what kind of sandwich defines you as a voter? In the wake of the Chick-fil-A firestorm, it may come as no shock that restaurant preferences can say quite a lot about a person’s politics. That’s the idea behind a graphic posted on Sociological Images by Gwen Sharp that charts customers at a handful of restaurants against their voting behavior and political outlook. As with almost everything else in 21^st century, there’s a pretty clear partisan divide here. But what’s really interesting, says Sharp, is what the results say about the class dimensions of voter turnout: patrons at sit-down restaurants, whether liberal or conservative, were in general much more likely to vote than fast food customers. It also points out an irony of the Chick-fil-A controversy: while Chick-fil-A customers are in general very conservative, they’re not among those most likely to vote. Whether the restaurant’s recent politicization changes this, is hard to say.    

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“Quick, Henry, the Flit!” Long before Horton the Elephant and Yertle the Turtle, Theodore Seuss Geisel made a name for himself in advertising and political cartoons, says Josh Jones at Open Culture. One of his most famous ads for Standard Oil’s Flit insect repellant went about as viral as anything could in the 1930s, and Geisel was soon called on to devote his artistic skill to the Allied war effort. Following the war, and after recasting himself as Dr. Seuss, Geisel devoted himself to somewhat more high minded themes and ideas. But these early works still retain a kind of surreal Seuss magic, especially when you consider the context. Here’s a link to some more.

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Turns out dirty elections go back a long way. In 1758, while running for the Virginia House of Burgesses, George Washington buttered his voters up with free beer on election day. That’s the first milestone on Mother Jones’ new dark money timeline, beginning with the American colonies. But of course, it only gets worse from there.

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With or without a heat wave, most Americans are probably not taking to the beach this summer. That Americans have less vacation days than workers in most other rich countries is no surprise, but it turns out most of us don’t even use the time we get. A recent survey by Right Management found that American workers leave an average of 11 vacation days unused each year, out of fear of being fired, says Kathy M. Newman in Working Class Perspectives. The survey also found that two thirds of American workers avoid taking lunch breaks and many avoid taking sick days.

And many companies are starting to take notice. But rather than provide better working conditions, firms like McDonald’s and Applebee’s are tapping into worker fatigue in advertisements, Newman says. In one recent ad for VisitLasVegas.com, a Norma Rae-looking scene unfolds in which a woman in an office attempts to organize her fellow office workers to, well, visit Las Vegas. Whether the woman is later fired for taking her vacation time is hard to say.

Image by eyeliam, licensed under Creative Commons.  

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The new transpo bill may be disappointing for cyclists, but that doesn’t stop more and more people from getting interested in biking. And increasingly, that means universities and think tanks, says Pacific Standard. Ideas like bikeability and how cycling figures into class distinctions are gaining a big following on campuses throughout the country. North Carolina’s Lees-McGrae College even offers a cycling minor.

And Congress also looks pretty powerless to stop a new push for national bike routes led by nonprofits like the Adventure Cycling Association. Currently, six national routes are in the works across the lower 48, including—get this—Route 66, all the way from Chicago to LA, says Grist. The Great American Bike Trip, as its known, is still very much in the planning stage, but a nod last year from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials—comprised mostly of state DOT big wigs—was a big step forward. If all goes according to plan, the road trip of the 21^st century could look very different.  

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The Baffler’s Thomas Frank asks, how vibrant is your city? And, more to the point, who cares?

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Redlining and blockbusting may be long gone, but segregation isn’t going anywhere, says the Pew Research Center. A new study finds that segregation based on income level has increased dramatically since 1980, especially in the Sunbelt and the Northeast.

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Adrien Brody does a mean Salvador Dali in Woody Allen’s recent Midnight in Paris, but Dali himself is no stranger to the big screen. In the late 1960s, the surrealist master appeared on not one, but three French TV commercials for chocolate, wine, and yes, even Alka-Seltzer. Open Culture posted this video medley, along with some fascinating background.

Oh, and here’s an equally bizarre Dali appearance on What’s My Line in 1957.

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A little good news on climate from Treehugger: despite the heat wave, US energy production is generating its lowest carbon emission levels since 1992. Reportedly, this year’s first quarter saw an 8 percent drop from 2011.

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Finally, how much do you spend on entertainment? Sociological Images reposted an interesting graphic comparing household budgets between classes. Among the biggest differences between rich and poor are how much goes to health insurance, food, and especially retirement. More surprising were the constants: most people tend to put about the same share of their income toward things like clothes, going out to eat, and even education, regardless of how much they make. And as a general rule, working class families tend to spend a much bigger pie slice on immediate necessities like utilities and groceries.

And those differences are growing. A new interactive feature from Demos charts the demographics of poverty in America, and how they’ve changed since 1970. Nearly 50 million Americans today are below the poverty line, and people of color, women, and young people disproportionately affected.

Image by Prayitno, licensed under Creative Commons.