When you turn to the political coverage in this month’s issue,
you will notice two words conspicuously missing: Obama and
Romney. It’s not that we don’t have strong feelings about the
candidates, but weighing in on the minute-by-minute, blow-by-
blow process of politics is not what DISCOVER does. There is
plenty of that (too much perhaps) elsewhere in the media
landscape. I am much more interested in the broader perspective:
not what politics will look like in two months but in two years,
or twenty. On that scale, personalities become less important
and the role of science and technology becomes much more clear.
The steam engine gave rise to the whistle-stop campaign tours of
the early 20th century; television made the first 1960 Kennedy-
Nixon debate into a national event. Web-based organizing is
ushering in new possibilities today. Not everyone will like the
effects of technological change. In the United States, the
effort by Americans Elect to create a centrist party via
Facebook got zero traction in this cy