My post about the iPhone generated all sorts of fascinating responses from TPM Readers. Some of these responses were on the secondary question I raised about the pace of invention and scientific breakthroughs and whether or not it’s slowing down. One of the most interesting replies I got was from TPM Reader DN who sent in this note …

I liked your aside about iPhones. I’m writing this from the big American Physical Society meeting (this year in Minneapolis) that focuses on “condensed matter” or solid-state physics, the branch of physics that basically gave us the iPhone and a huge fraction of modern technology. The fact that we, humanity, understand and can control/engineer the properties of materials on a deep level is one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the species, and it’s massively underappreciated. Astro and particle physics get vastly more press and attention in pop culture, but solid-state physics affects your daily life far more. It’s rich and full of beautiful ideas, though admittedly it can be very tough to explain to a general audience.

Over the years I’ve written about structural problems in the digital news industry, often driven by the growth of platform monopolies and other issues. Just in the last few months and even in the last few weeks we’ve seen a new round of publications shuttering or pivoting to publication zombiehood. So why is this happening? Why is your favorite news site suddenly going under? If you’re listening you’ve probably heard the story in general. But I wanted to share some numbers with you that I think will make it much more concrete.

(I think we can add something to the equation here because for a mix of business and personality reasons, we’re willing to share very granular dollar figures that very, very few other publications are willing to share.)

This chart which I just made shows the exact dollar amounts TPM brought in over the previous eight years through programmatic or “third party” advertising. As I think is pretty clear, if this is your business, you’re dead. You don’t have a business.

In this late post below, I discussed the now very consistent polling errors overestimating Donald Trump’s margins over Nikki Haley. I get why some analysts are quick to dismiss the larger import of this phenomenon: people assume you can draw direct, linear conclusions about a general election from polling anomalies in a primary election. And you can’t. But as I said last night, it’s a mistake to say this means nothing. G. Elliot Morris, the new head of 538, has a good piece up about this. The gist is that because of a mix of those sampling and modeling issues discussed in yesterday’s Backchannel, pollsters seem to be having a hard time finding normie Republicans. Needless to say there aren’t many of them these days. And that is part of the polling challenge. But these primaries show they are there and that pollsters seem to be missing a non-trivial number of them.

Outside of Vermont, which Haley appears to have won, Haley is getting beaten just about everywhere tonight. That’s 100% expected. But we are seeing that polling seemed to dramatically overstate Trump’s margins. So for instance 538 had Trump up 49 points over Haley in Virginia. But it looks like it will be just under 30 points. Needless to say these are still very lopsided defeats. But that’s also a pretty big polling miss.

Folks, North Carolina Republicans just chose this whack-job as their nominee for governor.