Sunday Night Links

* False hope watch: Could Obama Win Arizona? Here’s The Math. I’m skeptical this is a possibility, but it’d be great to see the reaction from Fox News if systematic undercounting of Spanish speakers lead to a surprise Obama win.

* The 2012 Election in Three Sentences.

Romney can tell you exactly what he wants to do, but barely a word about how he’ll do it. Obama can’t describe what he wants to achieve, but he can tell you everything about how he’ll get it done. It’s a campaign without real policies against a campaign lacking a clear vision.

* The public editor takes up the New York Times‘s complicity with drone warefare.

* If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.

* The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

* “It’s all over,” says TC Boyle. “This planet is doomed. In a very short time, we’re probably not even going to have culture or art. We’re going to be living like we’re in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” In 2000, Boyle published A Friend of the Earth, a novel set in 2025 in a California recently devastated by ecological collapse, where numerous animals have become extinct and rain falls heavily for the majority of the year. “Looking back,” he says, “I should have probably moved the date forward to 2015. We live in a very different world to the one that 19th-century novelists lived in. It’s a godless world, without hope.”

* Decriminalise drug use, say experts after six-year study.

* University Endowments Face a Hard Landing.

* And I have no idea how Princeton Review cooked up its “twenty most apathetic colleges list,” but they picked Duke for #4, so there must be something to it…