News You Might Have Missed:
This is Sinclair, ‘the most dangerous US company you’ve never heard of’: Most Americans don’t know it exists. Primetime US news refers to it as an “under-the-radar company”. Unlike Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, virtually no one outside of business circles could name its CEO. And yet, Sinclair Media Group is the owner of the largest number of TV stations in America.

“Sinclair’s probably the most dangerous company most people have never heard of,” said Michael Copps, the George W Bush-appointed former chairman of Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the top US broadcast regulator. [The Guardian, 8/17/17]

Senator Chris Coons – Progressive Values Can’t Be Just Secular Values:The Democratic Party has to recognize that progressive values can’t be just secular values. It needs to see that we can only solve our nation’s most urgent problems and shape a more equitable America if we trust each other, listen to each other, and engage with those who are traveling along secular and scriptural paths. [The Atlantic, 8/13/17]
How Detroit’s Mayor Became Unbeatable: Detroit used to look like how America ends. Abandoned skyscrapers downtown. An 18-story abandoned train station looming at the edge of the skyline like a Roman ruin. Collapsing car factories, block after block of grass growing high over lots where the houses had burned or been abandoned. Bankrupt, with the governor putting a city manager in charge, looking at selling off its art museum’s collection to pay the bills-all while the glass towers of General Motors’ of-course-named Renaissance Center stuck up high above neighborhoods that were literally falling apart.

Now, all of four years later, Detroit looks like one answer to how America bounces back. [Politico Magazine, 8/29/17]

Where the robots are: Robots, it turns out, are congregating densely in some places but are hardly found in others. Specifically, the map makes clear that while industrial robots are by no means everywhere, they are clustered heavily in a short list of Midwestern and Southern manufacturing states, especially the upper Midwest.
 
This clustering follows logically from the fact that the auto industry-highly concentrated in the Midwest and upper South-currently employs nearly half of all industrial robots in use. (Lesser but significant users are the electronics and rubber and plastics industries). But at any rate, more than half of the nation’s 233,305 industrial robots are burning welds, painting cars, assembling products, handling materials, or packaging things in just 10 Midwestern and Southern states, led by Michigan (which accounts for nearly 28,000 robots, 12 percent of the nation’s total), Ohio (20,400, 8.7 percent), and Indiana (19,400, 8.3 percent), followed closely by Tennessee. By contrast, the entire West accounts for just 13 percent of the nation’s industrial bots. [Brookings Institute, 8/14/17]
News from the Center: 
 
Louisville Mayor on Charlottesville violence, social mobility, and jobs:
 
And to hear more extensive coverage on Mayor Fischer’s plans to transform Louisville into an urban laboratory for innovation : [Charlie Rose, 8/14/17]