This episode is about one of Sam Wang’s favorite topics: gerrymandering.

Wang visited the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 3 to hear arguments in Gill v. Whitford, a case challenging Wisconsin’s 2011 redistricting plan as being the product of partisan gerrymandering. With the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, Wang and collaborators are studying how voting districts are created, giving insight into how it works and offering ideas on how it can be and is being addressed.

In this episode, Julian Zelizer and Wang discuss the case, Wang’s day in D.C. and whether this case could potentially put guardrails on the partisan gerrymandering process.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the author of several books including, most recently, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the international and national media on political history and contemporary politics. He has published more than 600 hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com.

Wang is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is known for his books "Welcome to Your Brain" and "Welcome to Your Child's Brain" and for his founding role at the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog providing U.S. election analyses. In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate U.S. presidential polls using probabilistic methods. He has also developed new statistical standards for partisan gerrymandering. A neuroscientist, Wang's academic research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, the cerebellum.