I am an adult; deliberately naïve, dewy-eyed optimism is not the proper posture for a responsible adult, is it?

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.

I don't want to romanticize the world in which everybody watched three networks and the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were incredibly dominant. That time has passed.

The Democratic vote consists of minorities and educated whites.

There are systemic, painful problems of globalization and de-industrialization that cannot be solved with a phone call or a tweet or an angry speech or trying to isolate the press and the first amendment. Sooner or later, the Donald Trump show, which is a projection of strength and authority, will have to deliver to his voters. And if he doesn't, in very real terms, if he can't supersede a situation where a president cut the unemployment rate in half, if he can't do better, if he can't open factories and all the rest that he's promised, then I think he's in trouble.

Capitalism in Russia has spawned far more Al Capones than Henry Fords.

From a personal point of view, I'd like to interview my great-grandparents because I barely knew them, and I know next to nothing about my family beyond 100 years.