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Emily, I'm with you. This campaign was about the right leader at the right time: It's really only been since we went to the polls that breaking the racial barrier has become the euphoric narrative of the election. Exit polls and popular discourse suggested that most people checked the ''content of his character'' box, not the ''color of his skin'' ...

Jodi Kantor has a piece in the Times today examining our first family-elect's ''acute awareness'' that everything they do ''will brim with symbolic value.'' She's mainly talking about what they will represent racially, of course.  But that's not the whole story: I can't stop thinking about Michelle Obama's declaration last week that her plan ...

I, too, am fascinated by all of this postgame revelation, Anne and Emily. I'm having a hard time believing, though, that Palin—the governor of an American state surrounded by Canada—did not know what NAFTA was, nor that Africa wasn't a country. She's literate; her parents were teachers. It sounds to me like a sarcastic comment was taken as fact. ...

Last night I woke my 9-month-old baby—fast asleep in her Obama shirt—to watch the acceptance speech. My computer cord shorted out in a giant tumbler of champagne. I wept, and then wept again, and then wept again; Jesse Jackson's tears jerked my own the hardest. For the first time in my life, people took to the streets in celebration of ...

If you've already voted and already memorized the Slate tipsheet for tonight's returns, you may be feeling like I am: anxious, restless, hovering uncertainly in the intense stillness before this evening's big noise. Futile attempts at normalcy shut down at least an hour ago. If you're unable to rip yourself from your laptop, scroll through this ...

Ah, the irony of the sexy librarian inquiring whether it's legal to ban books. What I was initially getting at was less how Sarah Palin defines herself and more how our culture has responded to those definitions. For example, in all the McCain blame-game conversations that are emerging in the press today--like this one by Slate's Christopher ...

I was saddened this evening to read about the death of Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or as anyone who has read Dreams From My Father might remember her, ''Toot.''  Toot was an ordinary woman who raised an extraordinary family and who increasingly lived race in America in a way few have. Living in Texas after the war, Toot shooed her ...

My beloved Liz Lemon—er, I mean Tina Fey—isn't the only one suggesting that Sarah Palin's focus has shifted from 2008 to 2012. Today, trying get a jump on the post-election story before the polls even open, much less close, a host of politicos are placing their bets over who will emerge from the broken GOP as the next to be (unofficially) ...