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The Trump voters you don’t know

Christian Science Monitor

Noted: The promise to “Make America Great Again” “appeals to a time when white working-class men had a higher status in society than they do now, and race is in there,” says Katherine Cramer, who has spent the past nine years talking with rural Wisconsin voters for her book, “The Politics of Resentment.”

Deserving families go on shopping spree

NBC-15

The holidays are just around the corner and for some families, gift giving may not be possible.That’s why Nigel Hayes, UW-Madison student athlete and the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County teamed up to help local families by taking them on a shopping spree. Life hasn’t been exactly easy for the Schultz and Keaton families.

Cramer: For years, I’ve been watching anti-elite fury build in Wisconsin. Then came Trump.

Vox

Something extraordinary happened in rural America in the 2016 election. Donald Trump appealed to folks in rural communities in an unprecedented way — yet polls failed to capture the depth of support for him in such places. Many pundits have since taken stabs at explaining the problem, yet little of the commentary is rooted in actual research.

Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Resentment

Scientific American

Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters.

Why Do Raccoons Flourish As Urban Pests?

Wisconsin Public Radio

In Wisconsin, like most of the country, Raccoons are practically omnipresent. Their adaptability has allowed them to move from the country landscape as a wildlife creature to an urban life in cities and towns across the state. There are a few factors that make the raccoon especially adept at finding the food and shelter they need living among people, said University of Wisconsin-Madison professor David Drake.

Voting Early, and in Droves: Nearly 22 Million Ballots Are Already In

The New York Times

Quoted: According to Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, any increase or decrease in early voting between election cycles depends on three factors: whether the availability of early voting has changed, whether the state has become more competitive, and what the campaigns have done to promote early voting.

Using wood pulp and footsteps, a professor just found a new source of renewable energy

Digital Trends

While thousands of people the world over continue to go solar to generate alternative energy, a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison just made a major breakthrough on a completely unique new conductive material: wood pulp. While the mention of wood pulp mention leave many scratching their head, the lab found a way to manufacture floorboards out of the commonly wasted material, and did so in a manner that took advantage of its composition of cellulose nanofibers. In other words, the team of engineers managed to develop a flooring material capable of generating electricity by something as simple as a footstep.

Sims: ‘Bay’ imparted wisdom that shaped grandchildrens’ view of world

Madison Magazine

My grandmother, whom my family affectionately referred to as “Bay” because she was the youngest of her siblings, was one of the wisest people I’ve ever known—especially when you consider the fact that she only had an eighth-grade education. She would often tell me, “If you don’t stand for somethin’ you’ll fall for nothin’.”

Taking Gard Way a good route for Greg Gard

Madison Magazine

The Cobb Corn Roast Festival was winding down. The softball, volleyball and bean bag competitions were over. The Texas hold’em poker games, garden tours and 5K run had raised money for the local library. As locals gathered at the burger and brat stand and beer tent on that sunny August afternoon, excitement was in the air. The proud citizens of Cobb—population 458, in the rolling farmlands of southwestern Wisconsin—gathered to celebrate the town’s most famous son, University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard.

‘Passing the Mic’ celebrates hip hop in Madison

WISC-TV 3

The University of Wisconsin-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives will host its annual Passing the Mic event this weekend that will celebrate the transformational potential of hip hop arts in the Madison community and on the UW-Madison campus. This is the 12th annual Passing the Mic event, which is one of the truly diverse, multicultural events that the city of Madison will see.

Even trust in fact-checking is polarized

Vox.com

Noted: But fact-checking itself can be an inherently controversial and “risky” form of journalism, as Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison and author of the book Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, told me earlier this summer.

Schools Teaching More Effective Ways to Argue

Voice of America

The third and last U.S. presidential debate takes place Wednesday.

The earlier debates were marked by political nastiness that many historians say is at its worst level in years. Some teachers, however, are working to make debates less angry. They are teaching their students about civil discourse.

Paula McAvoy is the program director of the Center for Ethics and Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2015, she and Diana Hess published a book called “The Political Classroom.”

UW-Madison surveying students on campus climate

Wisconsin State Journal

In an effort to gauge how comfortable people from different racial, religious, political and other backgrounds feel on campus, UW-Madison is launching a survey of its student body that officials say could inform changes meant to improve the university’s climate.

It’s Official: Three-Toed Sloths Are the Slowest Mammals on Earth

Scientific American

After seven years of studying three-toed sloths, scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have made it official: the tree-dwelling animals are the slowest mammals on earth, metabolically speaking. “We expected them to have low metabolic rates, but we found them to have tremendously low energy needs,” says ecologist Jonathan Pauli.

UW-Madison teams snag innovation awards

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Two research teams — one with a potential vaccine for the Zika virus and the other with a new way of monitoring sedated patients — have won $10,000 each in an innovation competition organized by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Metaphorically Speaking, Men Are Expected to be Struck by Genius, Women to Nurture It

New York Times

Noted: Ann Fink, a neuroscientist and feminist biology fellow at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, says their study supports emerging evidence that harassment, discrimination and unconscious bias discourage women from breaking into male-dominated fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The study, she said, shows that implicit associations affect how people judge someone’s competence in the sciences — in this case, genius.