Filed under: Audio/Video, Home Video In the VHS days, rental versions of movies were usually saddled with preview after preview that you'd have to fast-forward through before getting to the main event -- a small penalty for not having to pay full-price to watch it. With the advent of the DVD, and no...

We here at Zoom In Online realize that you probably spend so much time perusing our site that you may occasionally look up from your web browsing and notice that multiple days have passed.  We appreciate that.  While we can't make up for your lost days of work or missing your spouse's/fr...

Cortjezter brings us another ‘End of day’ post, which you can find below. I’ll let him do the talking this time, and just sneak out the back door. I’ll see you guys in a few, short hours. Have a fantastic morning, everyone! Ok, so it’s really another post about Winter, ...

Peniel Joseph's insightful post last week on equality smartly notes that on January 20th, "the very aesthetics of American democracy changed, both symbolically and substantively, through the ascension of a black man to the nation's highest office." It is the power of that image, and that ideal, that...

It's hard to disagree with much of Michael Waldman's lovely post. It is inviting at the level of principle (who, after all, is against creating a robust participatory democracy?). And he's right at the level of practice - matching funds and universal voter registration are entirely sensible policy p...

Theda Skocpol rightly draws attention to President Obama's focus in his inaugural address on promoting more broadly shared prosperity: "The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity," he said. Indeed, to date, to...

Jedediah Purdy's eloquent and careful examination of Obama's inaugural language and potential vision of community captures two critical points about the current moment. First, he underscores how Obama's election suggests a dramatic generational shift in American politics. As the camera panned to bot...

Although some have pooh-poohed Obama's Inaugural Address, it rewards thoughtful rereading of its central message and resonate passages. One powerful part speaks to today's TPM/Democracy discussion about Opportunity. Having acknowledged the power of market capitalism to generate wealth and expand fre...

I'd like to offer a bridge between Rick Kahlenberg's very smart essay about education and integration and Jedediah Purdy's provocative piece on community. That bridge is metropolitan policy. For the first time since the 1970s, when Jimmy Carter created a short-lived and ultimately ill-fated Urban Po...

For those it really reached, Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric had two revelatory effects. One was his power to conjure up an ideal America that listeners could recognize and believe in. The other was his ability to convey a living idea of duty to other citizens and the country. In his voice, that du...