In this special edition of the podcast, Bill Finan—director of the Brookings Institution Press—talks with two of the authors of a new Brookings press book that explores America’s current political division from demographic and geographic perspectives. David Damore, Robert Lang, and Karen Danielsen, all professors at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, are co-authors of Blue Metros, Red States: The Shifting Urban-Rural Divide in America’s Swing States. Damore and Lang join Finan for this episode in which they address some of the factors that tend to make large metropolitan areas lean Democratic while existing in a sea of rural areas that are largely Republican. And, how do states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Texas—with both large urban areas and widespread rural areas—express this red-blue divide between rural and metropolitan areas? Listen also to find out which two counties in America could indicate which way the election is going on November 3.

The passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made me reflect on her quote, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.”

With exactly one month until Election Day, the two major party presidential campaigns and their top surrogates are beaming with optimism as they grind through the final push to a contest years in the making.

“Before March 2020, Nevada led the country in producing new jobs,” said Jonas Peterson, president and CEO, Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA). “Our economic development plan was working, and our economy was consistently becoming more diverse.” Across the state, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, technology and healthcare sectors were growing. In February, Nevada’s unemployment rate was 3.6 percent.

I am an honor student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a future educator, a mentor, a non-profit worker, a habitual volunteer in the community, a dependable son, a supportive brother, among many other things.

UNLV alumna Yanneli Llamas spent two years helping her parents obtain legal residency. They earned it in December, weeks before COVID-19 upended the United States.

On Aug. 7, the Nevada System of Higher Education attracted negative attention from students, the public and state officials after the board of regents’ chief of staff attempted to silence Regent Lisa Levine during a meeting with his reprehensible statement, “I don’t want to man-speak but I will have to if you continue to child-speak.”

Redlining was a government-sanctioned discriminatory policy that designated most urban minority-majority neighborhoods as places banks should not offer home mortgages. The term originates in color maps developed in the late 1930s by Homer Hoyt, an economist with the Federal Housing Administration, to direct mortgage loans made by the Home Owner’s Loan Corp. Redlining refers to the map’s color-coded neighborhood types: red zones indicated high-risk investments; yellow zones medium risk; and green zones low risk.

Is Southern Nevada on the verge of a tech revolution or is it just getting with the times?

“Using COVID to steal the state." That’s a tweet from President Trump Monday morning continuing to hammer Nevada on voting procedures and threatening legal action on Twitter. This comes after the state Senate passed Assembly Bill 4 to mail ballots to all active voters. Gov. Steve Sisolak signed the bill Monday.

At a time of crushing financial strain on schools, businesses, families and individuals, the need for a well-functioning government could not be greater. Nor could the need for citizens to understand how the government should function.

The recent special session pleased no one.

Many cities are well-known for their abundance of one kind of building — think of Miami Beach and its Art Deco hotels, Brooklyn’s brownstones, or Los Angeles’ mid-century dingbat apartments.

New offensives against major cities from President Donald Trump and GOP governors are pushing at the central geographic fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

When Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman went on CNN in April and called for the early reopening of casinos, offering the city as a coronavirus “control group” to see what would happen, Twitter exploded.

Derek Stonebarger, owner of ReBar, a bar that doubles as an antique store in the Las Vegas Arts District, was just starting to get back on his feet when Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered bars to once again close.

As the nation struggles with the resurgence of COVID-19, robust contact tracing could help alleviate much of the strain on our already-burdened health care systems. However, we have a massive shortfall in the number of available contact tracers.

First, UNLV lost $25 million in state funding for a new medical school building. Now, the university’s $20 million advanced engineering building is on the chopping block as lawmakers try to close the state’s $1.2 billion budget deficit.

The name of George Floyd looks set to enter the history books along with Rosa Parks and Emmett Till, as the face of a moment that fueled a movement. Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis was one that may have been added to the long tally of Black Americans who have died at the hands of police officers. It could have caused a brief, mostly local, flurry of attention before the world moved on.

Social media is here to stay. It is in our lives and our phones, in our news and our politics, and in the manner in which key events are transmitted and interpreted by the public.

Black Lives Matter protests have allowed Las Vegas residents to stand in solidarity with the civil rights movement that has extended from the United States to countries around the world.

The internet and social media have propelled the spread of false claims, narratives, stories and information to unprecedented proportions.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s murder of George Floyd epitomizes what Black taxpayers have never truly received: quality law enforcement. Black people are overrepresented in stops, arrests, convictions, and deaths at the hands of police. The failure to prosecute murderous police typifies a bad overall track record with solving violent crimes: Approximately 38% of murders, 66% of rapes, 70% of robberies, and 47% of aggravated assaults go uncleared every year.

Nevada election officials are confident Tuesday's primary will be smooth as the state attempts the first ever, largely mail-in voting primary amid the COVID-19 pandemic.