Red State, Blue State, Purple State November 04, 2006

There are lots of ways to divide the world: Optimists and pessimists. Scorpios, Geminis, Leos, etc. Vegetarians, carnivores and omnivores. Sure, labels are rigid, overly simple and never tell the whole story. But there's something fun--and potentially revealing--about trying to make sense of the world through a set of arbitrary categories. That's the impulse behind our monthly parlor game, where we get some of our favorite funny, smart people together to sort through the latest goings-on in America.

In the past, we've divided the news into high brow, low brow and middle brow stories. We've looked at world events through the lens of good news, bad news, and no news. Now we tap into some pre-election angst with "red state, blue state, purple state." We got together a staunch liberal, a red-blooded conservative, and a guy who's going through an inner-political crisis to find the inner blue state, red state or purple state embedded in the big news of the week. Is Halloween an embodiment of red state, blue state or purple state ideals? What about the Hubble Space Telescope? North Korea? Of course our panelists fought like cats and dogs, and made ample fun of each other in the meantime. And there's nothing new about hearing liberals mock conservatives, or vice versa. But usually, it's done behind each other's backs. The cool thing here is that they actually laughed together, and sometimes at themselves.