My deep sense of alarm has to do with Donald Trump's seeming lack of fealty to constitutionalism.

What I object to is tricking the reader and blurring the lines so that unsuspecting readers, thinking that they are getting something that is assigned and edited by the editorial side, are getting something quite different. They are getting an advertisement.

I'm a journalist - I'm not Robert Caro. I have a day job, and a pretty consuming one - a joyfully consuming one.

I live in a country where, at least by my sense of arithmetic and justice, Al Gore should have been president, not George W. Bush. To this day, John Kerry probably thinks he won Ohio in 2004 because he had suspicions about the vote in Ohio. And, by the way, Richard Nixon had suspicions in 1960 about the vote in Chicago when he lost to JFK.

We begin to inhabit oppositional and rarely intersecting mental universes having to do with ideology and fact and non-fact and news and non-news.

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.