In some perfect world where human nature is less messy and history less fraught, any and all people who had ever suffered discrimination would find common cause, gathering together under one big anti-bigotry banner.

Writers and reporters need to remind themselves they're not to be judged solely by the number of clicks or eyeballs on a given story, but there is this other value and this other important mission, and the key is balancing the two so that you stay alive long enough, whether you're an individual writer or whether you're a whole news organization, to keep doing what you're doing but that you don't get so driven by that that you forget that what you're supposed to be doing in a higher sense is informing people, is elevating the debate and not lowering it.

[Gore] tended to drone on and on, in singsong, narcotizing cadences best endured by the heavily caffeinated.

If you look at why do we end up with the nominees that we get often? It's because you have only a very small number of Americans participating in the primaries, and those people tend to be your most dyed in the wool partisans.

We've given people both in print and even more so on TV these enormous doses of Donald Trump because people are consuming enormous doses of Donald Trump. If we had gotten a signal that John Kasich got as big an audience, believe me, you would have seen a lot more of John Kasich so it's complicated who's to blame, the media or the people consuming the media.

If every four years in a presidential election, if you're a New Yorker or a Californian, and you realize that you are so much less important, that nobody is actually kind of targeting your needs because they're laser-focused on what will play in Florida and on what will play in Virginia.

In terms of the rise of social media and the kind of discourse that it encourages, the kind of pointed attitude it encourages, in terms of the number of venues like our conversation here where reporters who are not technically opinion columnists are giving analysis that's invariably gonna edge into opinion. I think our journalism is getting much more almost European in terms of that, that ideal of objectivity exiting it.