Hasta La Gadget!

No, empty nesters are not just the sad parents who are still sitting in their cars after dropping off their kids to college, unable to walk into an empty house. Eventually, they will steel themselves (probably after they run out of tissues) and go inside. Indeed, we are in the throes of college drop-off season and empty nesters are all around you. Here’s how you can spot them:

1. They are clustered in the pet toy aisle, all wearing college sweatshirts.

When forced to choose between the stuffed squeaky toy that costs $2.99 versus the one that costs $15.99, they pick the more expensive one. The pooch is worth it; she won’t leave and move 1,000 miles away. These parents also spring for the organic, gluten-free, made-in-a-nut-free-kitchen, must-be-great-because-it’s-so-damn-expensive dog food that the store keeps in the locked refrigerated case. These parents are huddled with the store manager discussing their grave concerns that said dog food could spoil on the way home; they also buy a special refrigerated bag to carry it in. And maybe a dog car seat harness, just for the pooch’s safety. How did they not get one before this???

2. About that sweatshirt.

Yes, it is 100 degrees out. But they won’t take it off, so don’t even suggest it. It is the last thing their darling son or daughter touched as they hugged them goodbye and ran off to be with his or her new friends. If you sniff it, you can actually pick up a faint odor of your child. It will be worn every day, possibly until Thanksgiving, and it will not be washed.

3. In the first 48 hours after drop-off, they will take at least 500 photos of either the cat or their child still at home, but only while they are sleeping.

Neither the cat nor child especially care to have their sleeping photos posted all over Facebook, but these parents will do it anyway. Please “like” them. They need you to “like” them.

4. Their student’s campus mailing address becomes exceedingly important.

At the point of drop-off, parents realize that they have a few 20 percent off Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons still unused and that this constitutes some kind of crime against humanity. But since they have already been banished from the campus, they just start shipping things directly to their student. Plus, didn’t the peer advisor say getting care packages was thrilling, and a good thing to do? Why yes, yes they did! Have at it Mom and Dad. Even though it looked like you couldn’t fit so much as another paperclip in that stuffed dorm room, isn’t an extra set of sheets a smart idea to cut down on time spent doing laundry? And boxes of cookies and some chocolates and maybe some frozen fruit on dry ice for smoothies? 

5. They stop strangers just to tell them how much they trust their kids.

All those stories you hear about wild parties and nobody studying and drunk hook-ups and skipping the classes that are costing $30,000? Those are all about someone else’s kid. Empty nesters are the people you don’t actually know but who make you their captive audience in the grocery checkout so that they can tell you about their kid who is attending the University of Party Central but will likely be the one who closes the library every night. Just smile and nod affirmatively.

6. Their student’s bedroom becomes a shrine, not a guest room.

Red velvet ropes are put up across the doorframe and the door has been replaced with plexiglass so that people can view the student’s room but not enter it or touch anything.

AYSO soccer trophies are housed in a new display case, protected behind bullet-proof museum-quality glass. You just never know who might want them or what they could fetch on the eBay black market.

Oh, and there is no tidying up of the room. It is as sonny-boy left it, which was just perfect in these parents’ eyes.

Empty nesters ask your indulgence for the next few weeks. We fully expect to return to normal by January.

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On a recent trip to San Diego, I met two Americans (in their 20s or 30s) who had never heard of Maine, the state where I am living. I tried to explain (“it’s the northernmost tip of New England,” etc.) and they still had no idea what I was talking about. I can’t speak as to why they never heard of one of our fifty states, but I have learned that most Americans in their lifetime never see Maine, and I get it. Remote, off in the quietest corner of our country, unencumbered by a metropolis or major sports team, but once here, you’ll understand why it’s nicknamed the “Pine Tree State.” Hundreds of miles of the tallest pine forests in our country. Step into its woods, and pine cones carpet the forest floors. Where I live, they’re nearly as common as rocks. You’ve probably held them, maybe even decorated a holiday wreath with them, but what are they? And what roles have these strange, scaly pine tree-spawn played in our world? You might be surprised that throughout history, cones have been symbolic of immortality, human enlightenment, and ‘the third eye.’ Why? After some digging, much light was shed on a secret world of little known cone facts starting with…

1. Pine cones are the official Maine State Flower.

When you think of flowers, you think of something colorful, lovely, delicate not a hard, brown, woody, grenade-shaped object with sharp sticky scales. So are pine cones technically flowers? No, actually they are not, which makes them the only official state flower that are not flowers at all (what’s up with that, Maine?). Cones are known in the botanical world as gymnosperm (seeds), and date back to prehistoric times – leading us to fact #2…

2. Pine cones were a dinosaur delicacy.

Parasaurolophus grazing in a Cretaceous pine forest (Photo courtesy of Rareresource.com):

Today, pine cones are prized food sources for squirrels, woodpeckers and crossbills, but about sixty million years ago, they were a favorite meal of Parasaurolophus, the famous crest-headed hadrosaur (often referred to as duckbill dinosaurs because their skulls resemble modern ducks). Parasaurolophus had uniquely formed jaws and thousands of rows of teeth perfectly adapted to eat tough, chewy pine cones, which they savored in their Cretaceous marshlands habitat as fossils attest. Parasaurolophus weren’t the only ancient beings fixated on pine cones…

3. The Pope, his pine cones, and other examples of pine cone worship…

Images of the Mayan God, Chicomecoatl (“7 Snakes”), depict the deity offering pine cones in one hand and an evergreen tree in the other. Images of Osiris, ancient Egyptian God of the dead, carrying a staff of two intertwining serpents rising up to meet a pine cone date back to 1224 BC. Dionysus, of Greek mythology, carried a staff (a “Thyrsus”) topped by a pine cone. Similarly, today, the Pope’s sacred papal staffs all feature a pine cone near the top. And just outside of St. Peter’s in Vatican City is the “The Court of the Pine Cone” where a huge (three story tall) bronze sculpture of a pine cone (“Pigna”) literally holds court.

Cortile della pigna “Court of the Pine Cone” in Vatican City (photo by David Constanti)

4. Want to get pregnant? Place a pine cone under your pillow.

This trick seemed to work for ancient Celtic women who believed in pine cones as a symbol of fertility. Celts trying to conceive would place a pine cone under the pillow as a fertility charm. Ancient Romans also associated pine cones with Venus, Goddess of love and fertility.

5. We’ve all got pine cones in our brains!

Well, sort of. The Pineal Gland, the geographic center of our brain, is named for the pine cone because of its shape. The Pineal governs our body’s perception of light, as well as our wake/sleep patterns. It receives the highest amount of blood flow of any organ in our body other than our kidneys. The Pineal Gland is long considered our biological “third eye” and “the epicenter of enlightenment.” This may explain why pine cones have been exalted in religious imagery for thousands of years.

6. Pineal Glands aren’t the only thing named after pine cones…

In 1600s Old English, the word “apple” was applied to coin terms for many fruits and flora including “earth apple” (a potato), “love apple” (a tomato), “oak apple” (the round nut produced by oak leaves). “Pine apple,” was named as such for the tropical fruit’s resemblance to pine cones. “Pineapple” is the only one of these Old English terms that stuck.

7. Some pine cones can actually nourish you

That’s not to say pine cones are edible, but humans have been consuming them in various ways for a very long time. The most popular method to bring pine cone goodness into your diet, is with pine nuts. Only 20 varieties of pine tree worldwide produce cones with large enough pine nuts for harvesting. The Korean Pine and the Chilgoza Pine of the Himalayas contain Asia’s best pine nuts. The Stone Pine produces Europe’s (and the world’s) most famous pine nuts. In North America, Pinyon Pines (which only grow between 6,000 and 9,000 foot altitudes) offer the finest pine nuts, and are largely harvested by Native Americans. Pine nuts are a good source of thamine (B1), Vitamin K and L, magnesium, and protein. And one of the best natural sources period for manganese, phosphorus and zinc. Italians have been using pine nuts (“pignoli”) since the Middle Ages as a prime ingredient in pesto, and desserts such as torta della nonna, and pignoli cookies.

8. Coffee, jam and seasoning!

Pine nut coffee (known as Pinon) is a dark roast specialty of the southwestern United States (especially New Mexico). Pine Cone Jam (similar to honey) has long been a staple in Ukraine, Georgia and Russia. Made from the natural syrup of boiled soft, green, young cones, the tasty, aromatic jam is used as a folk remedy for weakened immune systems. Pine cone jam has been used for centuries to treat bronchitis, cough, asthma, respiratory diseases, TB, arthritis, and cancers. You can find a recipe for Pine Cone Jam here: http://infohow.net/12414-varene-iz-sosnovyh-shishek.html Cooks worldwide use the immature green tender pinecones to use as edible garnish, season meat, or slip into tea. Some pine needles are edible too. Think about rosemary – very pine needly and similar.

The young tender green pine cones used for jam, seasoning, and tea (photo by Stan Potts; Cheftessbakeresse.com)

9. Pine cones, as you know them, are actually only the FEMALE of the species.

The male cones, even at maturity, are smaller, softer, less impressive, and much less distinctive then the iconic female cones. You might not have ever noticed them. The male cones release pollen, which drifts into the air and eventually finds female cones.

10. Pine cones are nature’s barometer for wildfires and severe winters.

A pine cone on the forest floor is an indication of moisture and wildfire risk. Closed scales on a cone mean damp conditions while open scales mean the forest floor is dry. In autumn, pine trees produce more of the larger cones before a severe winter to ensure seeds will make it through squirrel and bird feeding frenzies.

11. Scandinavia loves pine cones!

Children in Finland and Sweden commonly make traditional toys called “Cone Cows” using sticks for legs, attached into the pine cow scales. In Finland, there is a park with giant pine cone cow sculptures large enough for children to ride on. Sweden has featured cone cows on their postage stamps.

A pair of traditional cone cows (Photo by Timo Viitanen)

12. Not all cones are pine cones.

All members of the pine family (pine, spruce, firs, cedars, larches, hemlocks, yews, etc) have cones, but “pine cones” only come from pine trees. The largest pine cones in the world are from the Coulter Pines of California/Baja California. Known as “widow makers,” these giant cones with dagger-like scales can weight up to 11 pounds.

Child holding a jumbo-sized widowmaker cone from a Coulter Pine (Photo by kensint0wn)

13. Pine cones in today’s arts…

Pine cones continue to be a fountain of inspiration for writers, artists, musicians worldwide. Native American tribes in Nevada use the outer shell of the pine nut as a bead in decorative jewelry. Artist Floyd Elzinga’s pine cone scuptures are made from repurposing old shovels.

Floyd Elzinga’s work “Colonization Device” 70″x54″ diameter (Photo by Floyd Elzinga)

Also of note, The Pinecone is author Jenny Uglow’s biography of 19th Century Cambrian architect Sarah Losh – well reviewed by the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/books/review/the-pinecone-by-jenny-uglow.html?_r=0

And you can rock out to pine cones too. Pine Cones are a rock band from Athens, Georgia (home of The B-52s, R.E.M. and many others) whose full length debut album, Sings For You Now, was released in 2015. And they are not to be confused with The Rockin’ Pinecones who are a rootsy New Orleans-style Cajun/Zydeco/R&B band that formed in 1988 in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. And this is not to be confused with the wonderful Sticky Vikki and The Pinecones (fronted by singer/songwriter Vikki Lee) who will entice fans of Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams with their rockabilly twang…

Sticky Vikki & the Pinecones Why Do I Breathe? live in Grass Valley, California:

Rock on all you pine cones! I could go on and on, but we’ll stop at #13. Now put your computer down, walk outside, and have your own pine cone adventures. See you in the woods!

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If the problem you’re solving is not hard, it’s not worth doing. – Aneel Bhusri, CEO of Workday

In 2005, two longtime friends and software visionaries Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri decided to form a cloud-based finance and human resources startup. Duffield had founded PeopleSoft in 1987, where Bhusri served as senior vice president of product strategy. The result was Workday. Today, Workday’s enterprise applications for finance and HR are disrupting the global software industry, servicing some of the largest companies in the world, including my company Salesforce. Today, more than 1,000 organizations, including Fortune 50 enterprises, are Workday customers.

Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri – Founders of Workday, 2005

Ray Wang, bestselling author and CEO and founder of Constellation Research, and I invited Aneel Bhusri to our weekly show DisrupTV to discuss business, leadership lessons learned during his incredible journey, as well as emerging and highly disruptive technologies in the financial and talent management industry.

Aneel Bhusri is co-founder and chief executive officer at Workday. Aneel has been a leader, product visionary, and innovator in the enterprise software industry for more than 20 years. In addition to his role at Workday, Aneel serves on the boards of Intel, Cloudera, Okta, and Pure Storage. Aneel is also an advisory partner at Greylock, a leading venture capital firm that he has been associated with since 1999.

DisrupTV Episode 0030 Featuring Aneel Bhusri, Steve Boese & Holger Mueller from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

1. You cannot replace luck and timing

From a startup to a highly successful company with a 98% customer satisfaction score, Workday has been a great success story. Bhusri and his team have a consumer internet mindset that drives the management and innovation philosophy at Workday. The same leadership guiding principles that led to Bhusri’s success as a successful venture capitalists at Greylock are employed at Workday.

“You can’t replace luck and timing. With Workday our timing was perfect. We started in 2005 right as cloud computing was beginning to take off. Salesforce had really established this new business model and so we were very lucky that way,” said Bhusri. Hard working entrepreneurs who adopt a beginner’s mindset and intellectually curious tend to be more lucky and at the right time and right place.

2. Find a good mentor

Bhusri advises entrepreneurs to find a great mentor. “I found a great mentor early on in my career, Dave Duffield – a legendary software innovator, great individual and a wonderful leader and human being,” said Bhusri. Bhusri also embraces reverse mentoring, where he purposefully connects with younger employees at Workday, customers and business partners to help better guide Workday’s innovation vision and company strategy.

3. If the problem you’ are solving is not hard, then it’s not worth doing

“You don’t see a lot of great companies built on easy problems to solve. In many cases you see a startup and people say, ‘wow, that looks too hard of a problem to solve’ and that’s when I say go do it because that is where real opportunities get created. If you are successful, you are not going to find a whole bunch of competitors chasing you because you are solving a real hard problem,” said Bhusri.

4. Listen to your customers

“Our very simple philosophy is that we really take care of our employees and they take care of our customers. Every employee at Workday thinks about how they are going to customers be successful. It is a simple formula but a lot of companies go out and they don’t listen to their customers, they don’t try to solve hard problems, making it tougher for themselves to create a great business,” said Bhusri. Dave Duffield and Bhusri genuinely love collaborating with customers. Both also are very employee centric. Duffield and Bhusri interviewed the first 500 employees at Workday. They didn’t interview the candidates for their skills, they were looking for good cultural fit, customer focus, and being good team players. Then Duffield and Bhusri let the first 500 Workday employees hire the next 5,000 employees.

5. Your culture is your brand

“There’s a lot that I’ve learned by watching how Marc Benioff and Salesforce build a great company round being tight with customers and have those customers be strong advocates for Salesforce. I think that’s the new way of doing business in enterprise software. The beauty of the cloud model is that it brings you closer to your customers and that customer intimacy is mutually beneficial for both customer and company,” said Bhusri. Workday is a true cloud provider and so customers are using the same version which leads to great amount of transparency and sharing is far greater than legacy, on premise solutions.

6. Business leaders value analytics and reporting

Workday just finished their second quarter and the results share with Wall Street demonstrated the second-biggest quarter of selling financial services – the same phenomenon that Workday saw in HR is now in finances. There are several factors according to Bhusri, namely analytics and reporting. Getting accounting done is a commodity. CFOs are looking for better analytics. Workday is delivering unified planning and transaction capabilities that can only be delivered using a true multi-tenant cloud architecture. Finance is looking for real value and they want better analysis and reporting.

7. All applications must be intelligent applications

“The next wave of cloud adoption is about taking advantage of all the data companies are collecting to make better decisions. Machine learning allows businesses to analyze massive amounts of data and find nuggets of insights to help leaders make better decisions,” said Bhusri. Workday’s first machine learning algorithm is talent insights, an application that predicts which of your top performers would stay or leave your company in the next 12 months with better than 90% accuracy. Machine learning can also assist in areas of career path and succession planning. Today, some of the largest banking clients of Workday are using their machine learning applications to career path their employees. Smart companies are using data to make predictions and to stay ahead of their competition.

8. Strong innovation velocity requires a true cloud

Many of today’s tech companies are ‘cloudish’ and not really cloud, according to Bhusri. To keep up with today’s innovation velocity, companies must adopt true multi-tenancy cloud technologies and architectures. You cannot write new powerful machine learning algorithms against data-sets if the systems are not running the same exact version of the software configured – a true cloud model. The companies that are doing right are Amazon, Google, Salesforce and Workday and that’s why we are able to keep up with the pace of innovation,” said Bhusri.

9. Leadership diversity and succession planning are key to success

Workday is growth and success is all about their company culture and people. Bhusri believes that cultivate a culture that celebrates diversity means having a proactive process that is focused on leadership succession and building the next generation of leaders. Duffield and Bhusri started this very early at Workday with the goal of creating a multi-generational leadership opportunity to build a great company by mapping and executing succession across the entire company. Great companies are always identifying the next set of great leaders.

10. Charity and mentoring is in the DNA of great companies

Bhusri values mentoring his employees and giving back to the community. Bhursi is also very welcoming of accessible, seeking feedback from all stakeholders. Millennials give Bhusri a lot of reverse mentoring. Bhusri believes that the only way to stay on top of technologies is to hang out with younger people, a lesson he learned from Dave Duffield.

“At the end of the day, we are all part of a community. Giving back at the Workday Foundation is just recognizing that and being part of a broader community. We are just a small piece of the community. We have been very fortunate and our growth and success is largely due to our community. The most exciting part about the Workday Foundation is that our employees actually drive where we give and they really drive the giving. Our employees get personally involved. It is fabulous when your hire the right people, with the right value system, and they want to give back and they push us to give back,” said Bhusri.

Bhusri is legendary entrepreneur, venture capitalist and CEO. He is also a passionate collaborator, mentor and listener. Duffield and Bhusri are passionate about building a company with happy employees who work hard to ensure their customer’s success. I encourage you to follow Aneel Bhusri on Twitter at @aneelb. Ray and I also spoke with two extraordinary HR experts and thought leaders Steve Boese and Holger Mueller and asked them to share their views on emerging talent management and future of work trend. To learn more about HR innovation and industry trends, please watch the video above for Boese and Mueller’s valuable insights.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

I co-authored this piece with Stephen Beban, a research intern working at FairVote this summer.

FairVote appreciates the data-driven journalism of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. We read with interest Eitan Hersh’s June 21st article, “With Trump in the Race, The Battleground Is Everywhere,” outlining Hersh and Bernard Fraga’s analysis on competition in US elections. Our own research reveals troubling trends about the scope of meaningfully contested elections, but Hersh and Fraga dispute our concerns. FairVote intern Stephen Beban and executive director Rob Richie have written two posts in response. The first one focuses on presidential elections; the second post will focus on Congress.

Professors Hersh and Fraga’s analysis of electoral competition makes the case that “the picture is much rosier” than FairVote characterizes in calling one of our reports “dubious democracy.” But we stand firmly by our position. This month we will release the latest edition of our Monopoly Politics report on congressional elections, and will follow up to this post with a preview of its findings. In this first post we examine the presidential elections and show that that levels of electoral competition in states are far from healthy. Without rose-tinted glasses, this conclusion is inescapable.

Accurately Measuring Competition

In looking at elections for president, governor, U.S. Senate, U.S. House and state legislature over the 2006-2012 period, Hersh and Fraga judge there to be “robust competition” based on two facts: that “the typical voter in this period saw a competitive race for one in four contests for which he/she could vote,” and that, as a result, “about 90 percent of Americans saw at least one close election between a Democrat and a Republican.” However, this is not nearly as positive as it sounds, when put in context.

Let’s first consider Hersh and Fraga’s generous measure of “competition,” which they define as races won by less than ten percentage points. Looking at the national popular vote, every presidential election since 1984 has been competitive by that definition, erroneously including George Bush’s comfortable win over Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Bill Clinton’s re-election against Bob Dole in 1996.

But of course presidential elections are contested state by state, with important implications for the number of voters that experience a competitive election even in a close Presidential race. We can further demonstrate that the measure of competitive is too broad by highlighting several states won by less than 10 percentage points that were not treated by either campaign or the media as competitive. To make our point, we’ll focus on results from 2000 to 2012.

During this period, 19 of 50 states were won by the same party in all four of these elections by margins of at least 10 points. The fact that the remaining 31 states were all won by less than 10 percentage points at least once might seem to confirm the conclusion that many voters experience a “competitive election” over time, but that conclusion is easily rebutted by looking at a few examples from those 4 elections:

• Democrats won California, Delaware, and New Jersey by an average of more than 15%. In 2004, however, John Kerry won these three states by less than 10%: California by 9.9%, Delaware by 7.6% and New Jersey by 6.7%; yet none were considered battlegrounds that year – indeed, out of nearly 250,000 presidential TV ads in the peak season of the campaign, not a single one aired in any of those states.

• Georgia, North Dakota, South Carolina, and South Dakota were all won all by Republicans by an average margin of more than 10%, but in 2008, McCain won them by less than 10%. Once again, neither campaign treated them as battlegrounds, so those states’ voters did not experience a “competitive” election.

Underscoring this point, FairVote has created what it calls the Presidential “Attention Index,” which looks at the share of campaign events and television ads a state received in the post-convention period. A score of 1.0 would mean a state received attention in proportion to its population size. In 2012, 37 states had an Index of less than 0.01, which means they received less than one percent of the attention we would expect it to receive based on state population alone. Of those 37, 34 were also comparably ignored in both 2004 and 2008 and are not considered potential battlegrounds in 2016– in other words, a large majority of states are recognized as fundamentally uncompetitive. And even competitive states are not created equal. Those closer to being the tipping point state in the battle for 270 Electoral Votes receive disproportionate attention from the campaigns.

Adopting a more reasonable definition of competitiveness (one more in line with the perceptions of candidates, voters, and forecasters), presents a far more limited scope of competition. Over the last six elections, the outcome in a clear majority of the Electoral College has been predictable- after all, winning a state 51-49% has the same consequence as winning 99-1%. Consistently, only about a third of the map in each election has been truly in doubt, with the rest of the country playing spectator.

Variation Over Time (or Lack Thereof)

Perhaps Hersh and Fraga’s argument might still be somewhat justified if enough states that made up the list of battlegrounds changed cycle-to-cycle – so that voters would have an opportunity for their state to be contested and gain the attention of the candidates over time. But this is not the case; in fact, it’s remarkable how static our elections have become. In a 2013 Presidential Studies Quarterly article by FairVote staff, we explain in detail how most states are becoming less competitive and how little states now tend to change in partisanship elections. Consider this excerpt and an associated table:

In 2012, just three states shifted their partisanship by more than 3.9%, all of which were small and ignored by the campaigns: Alaska, which became more Democratic without its governor on the Republican ticket; Utah, with a strong Republicans shift influenced by Mitt Romney being a Mormon who had coordinated the state’s 2002 Winter Olympics; and West Virginia. Only five states in 2008 had outcomes that deviated at least 3% from their 2004 partisanship: two states moved sharply towards Democrats (Hawaii, where Barack Obama grew up, and Indiana, where Obama benefited from his 2004 Senate campaign in neighboring Illinois and from building a campaign operation in a fiercely contested presidential primary) and three Southern states that moved sharply toward Republicans (Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas).

Table: Number of States Shifting Partisanship 5% or more in Consecutive Elections

2016: A Continuation of the Trends

2016 gives no indication of reversing these trends. FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model consistently shows that two-thirds of voters live in states that are likely to be uncompetitive in November, similar to historical results, with a clear minority whose votes will be decisive (even if, as in Florida 2000, they may not be representative of the overall result). So the playing field still features few competitive states.

And the cast remains fairly static, as demonstrated by the strong correlation between the 2012 results and 2016 polling (as others, such as Alan Abramowitz, have pointed out too). A good illustration of this is the similar cast of states that FiveThirtyEight has identified as likely tipping points in 2016: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. If these states sound familiar, note that they are the same states that were closest to the national median in 2012 and 2008, with the exception of Indiana in 2008. They are the only states where the major party tickets held campaign rallies after Labor Day in 2012, and this year have been the subject of more than 80% of the campaign rallies to date by the major party candidates since the California primary on June 7th.

Despite the drama of the 2016 campaign and Donald Trump’s allegedly volatile impact, the battleground is emphatically not everywhere – and the states that matter are overwhelmingly familiar and predictable.

Finally, we want to emphasise that it truly does matter that some states count and others don’t to the campaigns. Don’t expect candidates to waste a second’s thought or a dime of spending trying to influence the views of more than half the nation that lives in the uncompetitive spectator states – and, as a result, voters in these states will turn out to vote at lower rates. And it’s not just what happens in elections. A growing body of scholarly analysis – most notably, John Hudak’s Presidential Pork – shows that swing states are showered with more federal dollars that are directed by the executive branch.

In Part Two, we’ll turn to House races, and two statutory changes that would allow us to remove the well-deserved adjective “dubious” from our state of democracy.

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By Susan Crandall | Off the Shelf

Oh, the magnificence of the well-drawn character–well-drawn, mind you, not necessarily well-loved, and certainly not flawless and totally admirable. I adore a book that depicts the naked human spirit. The world is full of decent people making disastrous decisions. I love a book that can find the beauty in that. After all, we need a human soul for all of it to matter–and all human souls are imperfect. It’s easy–and rather bland–when we root for the true-blue hero, defender of right, protector of the meek.

It takes a brave writer to expose the human spirit with all of its weaknesses and misguided justifications, and to do it without judgment or excuse. M. L. Stedman does just that in The Light Between Oceans.

Tom Sherbourne survived doing what was necessary on the front in WWI, returning to Australia with his body and moral code intact but carrying shadow wounds on the inside. He feels if he can get away from people, time will banish those shadows. And so he accepts a posting as a lighthouse keeper on an uninhabited island off the coast. The isolation is complete, with only one ship arriving each season with supplies and a one-month leave at the end of three years. Soon he’s joined by his new bride, Isabel, a bold, spirited young woman.

For a time, all is well. Then, after miscarriages and a stillbirth in this remote place, Isabel is nearly broken. And one day, shortly after the stillbirth, a miracle (or a curse) arrives in a rowboat cast adrift with a dead man and a wailing infant. Suddenly Tom’s sure sense of right, the bedrock of his character, is compromised by his love and concern for his wife. Choices are made that will echo throughout not only their lives but those of others on the mainland.

Stedman bravely builds her story in that gray zone of character, both Tom’s and Izzy’s, and plumbs its depths to the max. She explores what happens when we’re willing to compromise our morality, not for our own happiness and gratification, but for that of a beloved. We experience Izzy’s brokenness in a way that helps us understand Tom’s desperation to save her. The Light Between Oceans paints an extraordinary experience of time and place. Even the pacing of the book enhances the sense of seclusion and moves with the stride of the times. Tom’s own emotional separation is reflected in the setting. He is somewhat aloof, and yet we feel him.

This book draws on strong emotions–whether you like or dislike Tom and Izzy, even if you condemn them for their choices, you will certainly understand the circumstances that set those choices in place. You will experience the depth of Tom’s love and Izzy’s wounded spirit. Stedman also shows with great clarity the profound effect of isolation on the human soul and how it can distort judgment in even the most upstanding and moral of us.

This is a thoroughly beautiful and tragic book, with two characters strong enough to carry you and your heart from the opening page until the last.

Susan Crandall is the author of several awarding-winning books, including The Flying Circus.

More Recommendations from Off the Shelf:

10 Books Coming to a Movie Theater Near You

14 Books Worth Revisiting From Today’s Best Writers

Get Off the Shelf Delivered Daily to Your Inbox

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