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One week after a historic presidential campaign that ended with the election of a man who billed himself as a post-partisan candidate of a unified America, this country is more divided than it was four or eight years ago. Or, less abstractly, while some danced in the streets over Barack Obama's victory, others bought guns. Here are some ...

Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard studied the Nuer, a pastoral people living in the Upper Nile region of Africa, herders who moved with their animals to the tune of the region's rivers. In flood times, Nuer tribes retreated to higher ground, and when the waters receded, the Nuer clans moved to the grassy valleys.Nuer tribes were constantly ...

Undecideds don't vote on issues. If they were interested in issues—or even in the personalities of candidates—they wouldn't be undecideds. ''They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary,'' C. Wright Mills wrote in 1953, ''they are inactionary; they are out of it.'' Mills was writing about the torpor of Eisenhower-era ...

The model for the modern political campaign is the evangelical megachurch. This isn't a partisan observation. Both George Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama adopted the basic organizing techniques that many ministers have been using since the 1970s to grow their churches to stupendous size. And why not? They work.The megachurch was built on an idea ...

Before last week, every time Valdis Krebs mapped the reading habits of those buying political books through Amazon.com, he found a few volumes read by both the left and the right. Krebs used data from Amazon to discover the patterns among readers of the top-selling political books. He would find the other books that readers of, say, Liberal ...

When Sam Gosling studied the differences between liberal and conservative college students, he and his colleagues went snooping for cleaning supplies. In the dorm rooms of conservatives, they found more cans of Ajax and ironing boards.In an unpublished paper titled ''The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives,'' Gosling, a psychology ...

My wife coined the term prespiracy to describe a conspiracy that had not yet occurred. It's a future conspiracy imagined into reality.Well, the prespiracies have started. Republicans are convinced ACORN has hijacked the election by registering legions of Democratic voters (all named Mickey Mouse). Not wanting to be out-prespiracied, People for the ...

Enough already with the words. Think of this as The Big Sort scorecard for the election, several different ways of seeing how the geographic clustering of like-minded citizens plays out in presidential elections.First, the sort itself. Here we compare the ''landslide counties'' in the 1976 and 2004 elections. (Landslide counties are those in which ...

While the rest of political journalism continues to parse the electorate by ways of life described by the U.S. census—Matt Bai gets up close and chummy with ''white guys'' in the Times over the weekend—we at The Big Sort will consider two measures that are much more telling: Spanking and shacking.Yes, if you really want to know how people will ...

''Jennifer'' called into the NPR show ''Talk of the Nation'' last Thursday to describe a wonderful democratic experiment she and her husband were conducting at the business they own in North Carolina.Their firm has about 100 workers, and she and her husband believe that ''it's important for all of our employees to really be engaged and aware ...