It's comfortable living in a cocoon -- associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforce them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972 the movie critic Pauline Kael said...

Facebook’s IPO will be good news for a whole host of reasons. In particular, users should be happy that the company will become a much more public-facing entity.

The intriguing scientific question is how can bariatric surgery result in an almost immediate improvement in the insulin resistance profile of diabetic patients?

One constant factor in the 14 contests with exit polls is that Mitt Romney has tended to run best among high-income and high-education voters. His leading opponents -- Newt Gingrich in South Carolina and Georgia, Ron Paul in Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia, and Rick Santorum everywhere else -- have run best among low-income and low-education voters.

As the international community and the US discovered in the early 1990s, getting humanitarian aid to needy Somalis is not an apolitical undertaking. It may not even be possible without being drawn into conflict in the Horn of Africa once again.

Republican Bob Turner's win in the New York 9th district special election is a big reversal from the 2008 general election. Voters just issued what amounts to an emphatic thumbs down on the policies of the Obama Democrats. This result is a rebuke to Barack Obama, but it is a rebuke as well—a stinging one, perhaps more stinging—to Senator Charles Schumer.

President Obama has kicked off a three-day bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, where the corn is high and at least some factories are spewing smoke. He won these Midwestern states handily in 2008, but he's not taking anything for granted these days. To understand the political economy of the region, it helps to put it in historic perspective.

The San Francisco Democrats have returned.