President Joe Biden mentioned the word "jobs" 43 times in his pseudo-State of the Union address last night. As a share of the speech, it was the most of any State of the Union, ever. Biden touted jobs the economy had already gained since he took office, pitched his "American Jobs Plan," and insisted that addressing climate change would create more jobs. He also talked about racial justice, gun violence and other topics, but Biden's favorite four-letter word sums up the message he wanted viewers to take away. [ Read more from The Associated Press]
The Legislature's conference committee for the public safety budget will hold its first meeting on Monday, as it begins the process of negotiating what might be the thorniest topic facing lawmakers as they craft a must-pass budget.
One wild card: Rep. Tim Miller, a Republican lawmaker who was the lone GOP vote in favor of the House's public safety budget. Miller is a member of the New House Republicans, a splinter group of anti-establishment conservatives; he appeared at a press conference Thursday morning with Democrats and offered himself as a bridge between those supporting and opposing drastic changes to Minnesota's police laws.
The Minnesota Department of Education will let a range of nonprofit organizations distribute free meals to students this summer, instead of reverting to the pre-pandemic norm of routing most of this aid through schools. The reversal comes under pressure from anti-hunger advocates. [Read more from the Pioneer Press's Josh Verges]
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is backing the "Endless Frontier Act," which would shovel more than $112 billion into scientific research. But the bill has landed right in the middle of a longstanding fight between advocates of "basic research" — general research without an immediate goal — and "applied research" aimed at a specific application. Schumer's money would be for applied research, including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. [ Read more from the National Journal's Brendan Bordelon]
Electoral systems translate votes into governments, and none of them are perfect translations — often by design. FiveThirtyEight breaks down role of the Electoral College, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, all of which happen to give modest (but not unsurmountable, as the present state of D.C. attests) edges to Republicans right now. [Read more from FiveThirtyEight's Laura Bronner and Nathaniel Rakich]
Americans, once described as a "nation of joiners," have been joining much less. As Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone, membership in everything from churches to bowling leads is down. Now demographer Lyman Stone is out with a new report for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, tracing the data on associational life back to the 19th Century and analyzing its causes and effects . (Much, Stone finds, is due to people being more affluent.) He also offers some solutions to revive associational life, largely from a conservative perspective, but the report is interesting even if you don't think public support for private schools and Sunday closure laws is a good idea. [Read the report]
Something completely different: Do you remember that striking drone shot of the Bryant Lake Bowl that went viral earlier this year? The filmmakers, Jay Christensen and Anthony Jaska, are back with a sequel: a complicated one-take drone shot through the Mall of America and Camp Snoopy Nickelodeon Universe. [Watch]
Listen: We all know the basic melodies of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons." But that's what makes Max Richter's "Recomposed" version such a revelation. Richter strips Vivaldi down to its core, and rebuilds it into something dramatically different and yet still identifiable, full of layered repeating loops. It's on my shortlist of writing music. [Watch live]
