I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

Hillary Clinton would say I'm going to fund a program that will find the local, you know, industrial or manufacturing jobs that are available and train you to do that job. And then you're going to get that job. And it's a much more of a nuts and bolts sort of policy vision.

We've just been sort of spinning our wheels for such a long time, for decades really, with each new president being considered illegitimate by the other side. That's been the case ever since Bill Clinton. And it's a - you can't keep frittering away your political capital that way and expect there not to be some long-term rot that sets in.

At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam.

When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.