A revolution is stirring in America. Like all great revolutions, this one starts with a simple but profound truth: Cities and metropolitan areas are the engines of economic prosperity and social transformation in the United States. Our nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas sit on only 12 percent of the nation’s land mass but are home to two thirds of our population and generate 75 percent of our national GDP. Metros dominate because they embody concentration and agglomeration—networks of innovative firms, talented workers, risk-taking entrepreneurs, and supportive institutions and associations that cluster together in metropolitan areas and coproduce economic performance and progress. There is, in essence, no American (or Chinese or German or Brazilian) economy; rather, a national economy is a network of metropolitan economies.

Cities and metropolitan areas are also on the frontlines of America’s demographic change. America’s population—and its workforce—will be much more diverse in the future than at present, and soon no single race or ethnic group will be the nation’s majority. Many of our metros are already living that future. In fact, every major demographic trend that the United States is experiencing—rapid growth, increasing diversity, an aging demographic—is happening at a faster pace, a greater scale, and a higher level of intensity in our major metropolitan areas.

Peter King is not one to sugarcoat his message. The two-decade veteran of the House of Representatives wears his Fighting Irish bona fides with pride. In his office, the walls are lined like a Queens pizzeria with photos of King and various political celebrities, a Notre Dame rug covers the floor, and a basketball backstop emblazoned with his alma mater’s dukes-up leprechaun mascot hangs in the corner. So when families of some of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting paid the New York Republican a visit this week, he did not shy away from telling them how hard it would be to round up House support for a bipartisan bill he is sponsoring to enhance background checks: “Hate to say it, but I haven’t heard the issue come up since December.”

And yet, Nicole Hockley, Francine Wheeler, Mark Barden, Neil Heslin, Nelba Marquez-Greene, and Bill Sherlach, huddled in chairs around the Notre Dame carpet, didn’t flinch. They have heard this many times in the six months since Adam Lanza blasted his way into the school in Newtown, Connecticut, and cut short the lives of 20 children and six educators—including their beloved sons, daughter, and spouse. As King headed to the floor for a vote, he warned that the furor over the surveillance of telephone and Internet data would further fuel the mistrust of government that stymied a Senate bill on background checks in April. In unison, Hockley, Wheeler, and Barden reassured him: “We aren’t going away.” 

Hell hath no fury like the Washington establishment scorned.

Since Edward Snowden came forward to identify himself as the leaker of the National Security Agency spying programs, the D.C. mandarins have been working overtime to discredit the man many view as a hero for revealing crucial information the government had wrongfully kept secret. Apparently, if you think hiding information about spying on Americans is bad, you are misguided. The real problem is that Snowden didn’t understand that his role is to sit and be quiet while the “best and the brightest” keep Americans in the dark about government snooping on private citizens.

Six months later, the story is familiar.

On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza burst into Sandy Hook Elementary and murdered 20 first-graders and six administrators and teachers. Two days later, President Obama visited Newtown, Conn., read aloud the names of the 26 killed and said “we can’t tolerate this anymore. We must change.”

If this were a story in the New York Post, the headline would blare: “SPLITSVILLE: Tab Tycoon Untying Knot With Young Lady Love.”

But since the New York Post is part of News Corp., and since News Corp is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and since the split in question is Murdoch’s own to Wendi Deng, his 44-year-old wife of 14 years, the coverage tomorrow should be, ahem, a bit more muted.

Edward Snowden can run, but according to his own revelations about ubiquitous U.S. surveillance, he cannot hide. He seems to fit the definition of a “whistleblower” rather than a criminal, having acted out of conscience to reveal an eavesdropping operation on such a scale that the public in his own democracy, and in others, should have a right to know about it, at least in the general terms in which he has described Prism. There is no evidence at this stage that he has deliberately or directly put lives at stake. Where could such a political fugitive be safe from extradition to face trial under the 1917 Espionage Act, with a death penalty possible but a more likely sentence being many years in a U.S. supermax prison?

Hong Kong was not the best choice—its Court of Final Appeal is really a court of penultimate appeal, with decisions subject to reversal by the government in Beijing, which may find it convenient to do a deal with the U.S. Pyongyang would offer a safe sanctuary, but North Korea is a gulag. Algeria, the refuge of choice for American public enemies like Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary in the 1960s, is now keen for CIA support against al Qaeda affiliates. Moscow beckons, but although Snowden’s ballerina girlfriend might get to dance at the Kirov, the Magnitsky case (Sergei Magnitsky informed on the crimes of state officials, who detained him in prison where he was killed) shows the world that Putin is no friend to whistleblowers. He would be miserable in Iceland, which is vulnerable to U.S. pressure.

Is the unpaid internship dead?

That’s what corporate CEOs and employment law attorneys were trying to figure out Wednesday after a U.S. district court judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures had violated the law by not paying interns who worked on the film Black Swan.

Every sport has its dominant athlete—Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt—but few athletes can claim to have achieved perfection. After all, what exactly is a perfect basketball game?

On Tuesday, for a breathtaking 30 minutes, Kelly Slater showed the world that he is a perfect surfer, scoring 20 out of 20 possible points in a quarterfinal heat at the Volcom Fiji Pro. A perfect heat, surfed in pristine blue water and pumping barrels. A perfect heat, which has only happened four times before in the history of the sport.

IN 2011, Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin stated that “as author of the Patriot Act,” he “applaud[ed] the House and Senate” for extending provisions of the controversial legislation, including Section 215 allowing investigators broad powers to monitor and seize “any tangible things” related to a terrorism investigation. Last week, in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sensenbrenner—now apparently surprised at how his legislation was used by the National Security Agency (NSA)—wrote that “as the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely disturbed by what appears to be an overbroad interpretation of the Act.”

Sensenbrenner was responding to documents leaked to The Guardian by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former contract worker at the NSA, that revealed a massive government data-mining program. The vague language of the Patriot Act, say the bill’s legion of critics, made the massive expansion of the surveillance state both possible and inevitable. Yet, as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf noted, the congressman had previously shrugged off concerns that the law could be abused, arguing in 2006 that “congressional negotiators added more than 30 civil-liberty safeguards not included in current law to ensure that the Patriot Act’s authorities would not be abused in the future.”

Sensenbrenner isn’t alone in changing his tune. According to a new poll released by the Pew Research Center, Americans are remarkably fickle in their attitudes about domestic surveillance. During the Bush administration, only 37 percent of Democrats found NSA spying programs “acceptable,” while 75 percent of Republicans backed eavesdropping on “people suspected of involvement with terrorism ... without first getting court approval to do so.” The same question, asked days after Snowden’s revelations, saw 64 percent of Democrats now backing NSA snooping, with Republican support dropping to 53 percent.