We need to talk to voters in large enough numbers and we need to have conversations that are probing and sustained enough that we understand where they're coming from because nothing is nonsensical. You know, in a democracy, in an election, in an electorate there's a reason why things are happening and it's incumbent upon us to delve deep enough to get at those reasons.

The way the electoral college works, the way the states have kind of sorted themselves out in such a way that most states, the conclusion is foregone and there's no reason for the candidate to be there and for that reason, for that same, because of those same dynamics there's no reason for the journalist to be there combing the opinions of voters there because we know that California's gonna vote Democratic.

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

I remember going to a Trump rally in South Carolina, and it was really important and it was really interesting to talk to the people who'd shown up there because they were not caricatures, and so often Trump voters, Trump supporters were being portrayed in the media, probably I'm guilty of it as well, as caricatures. Each of these people, and I talked to maybe a dozen of them, had a very particular reason why he or she was supporting Donald Trump , but these were not casual, inexplicable decisions.

You're encouraging a response in citizens and the public, that has nothing to do with an informed decision, that has nothing to do with policy, that has nothing to do with any of that but that just kind of turns it into a competition they're watching as if they're watching the Preakness or the Belmont Stakes and I think if we want people to make more cool-headed, sober-minded decisions covering elections as horse races is the antithesis of doing that.

I think the media has to continually remind itself, and I think we do but sometimes not well enough that we're not just an economic property.

Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!