The top 5 moments from the Denver Debate – in tweets per minute

10.3 million tweets were sent during the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. That is 114,000 tweets per minute (tpm) and shows that Americans were paying attention. Here are the moments that generated the most discussion, from the Twitter Blog: 159,000 tpm – Jim Lehrer quips – “Let’s not” 153,000 tpm – Obama …

Laugh and poke fun at the Presidential Debates with this humorous video

If you’re excited for the first Presidential Debate of 2012 – or if you just want to laugh, watch this video. It has everything from Hillary Clinton’s Victoria’s Pant Suits to George H.W. Bush’s silver foot in his mouth:     If this interests you the Harvard Kennedy School has a pre-debate “Politics as Theater” …

David Plotz: political speeches should be TED Talks

Politicians should embrace the TED talk, from David Plotz: Presidential candidates tweet, text, email, post to Facebook with the frequency of randy 18-year-olds…But then the hour comes for the Big Speech, the most important moment of the campaign, and they walk behind a podium, stare into a TV camera, and read (and read and read) …

A century of Olympic posters

    Images from the book “A Century of Olympic Posters” by Margaret Timmers: As snapshots through time, Olympic posters provide a fascinating record of our world, a lens through which we can explore links between sports and art, politics and place, commerce and culture. A Century of Olympic Posters offers an intensely visual representation of the modern …

In 1938, why were so many Austrians Nazi-friendly?

Why Were So Many Austrians Hitler-Friendly? By Rick Steves Today I stood on Vienna’s Heroes Square where, in 1938, more than 200,000 tearfully happy Austrians gathered before Adolf Hitler. The Nazi dictator stood on the palace balcony and stated, “In front of German history, I declare my former homeland now a part of the Third …

Environmentalist, and wealthy cofounder of Burt’s Bees, fights to create America’s next National Park

Burt’s Bees cofounder Roxanne Quimby wants to hand the government a new national park in northern Maine—election-year politics and residents’ NIMBYism be damned. Brian Kevin investigates the boldest conservation plan in decades. Technically, this Idaho-shaped chunk of land, which contains a 30-mile stretch of the International Appalachian Trail, is known as the East Branch Sanctuary. …

The ousted authoritarian government of Mexico – PRI – may be back

When Mexico’s long-ruling party was ousted by voters 12 years ago, giddy celebrants hailed the event as something like the fall of the Berlin Wall. For seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had governed virtually unchallenged, aided by election trickery, a well-honed ability to buy off potential troublemakers and, when that didn’t work, …

Nate Silver predicts our next President – by keeping a running forecast

If you haven’t heard of Nate Silver then you are in for a ride. Nate is very, very famous in two distinct areas, baseball and politics, for his ability to predict things. For baseball he developed, PECOTA, a system for predicting future performance of baseball players, and sold it to Baseball Prospectus in 2003. From …

European Union needs a President – says German Finance Minister

The European Union needs to become more integrated with a common finance policy and a central government, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Wednesday (16 May). “I would be for the further development of the European Commission into a government. I am for the election of a European president, he said at an event in …

HBO posts first episode of new show, Veep, on YouTube until May 21

HBO is continuing their YouTube experiment after posting Girls online, they are also hosting Veep. The show, which will only be available online until May 21, stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a former senator who’s been asked to be Vice President of the United States The full bio from HBO: Former Senator Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has …