FRANK BRUNI

Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it's not just a magnet for the curious. It's a sinkhole for the gullible.

… right now the Republican Party accommodates too much quackery, belligerence and misplaced moralism to play a fully credible part in a vital, essential debate about the size and scope of government. The party should be a place where voters who are reasonably concerned about government overreach can turn. It shouldn’t be a bastion of regressive social ideas and foul tempers.

A clueless electorate is a corruptible one …

“The Wisdom of Crowds” suggests that if enough bumbling people act in concert, they’ll find their way to a less bumbling place.

That we Americans are out to lunch isn’t news. But every once in a while a fresh factoid like the Obamacare ignorance comes along to remind us that we’re out to breakfast and dinner as well.

You can make a successful run for political office without an especially thick resume, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or for that matter a basic grasp of science.

Across decades, the toll of deaths related to fraternity revelry and recklessness is surely in the hundreds. And while physical stress plays a role in some fatalities, most reflect the kind of extreme drinking that’s in the DNA of so-called Greek life. Do we need any cause beyond all of that dying to do away with fraternities wherever possible and to diminish their prominence at schools where various circumstances, including the housing that fraternities provide, prevent them from being shuttered?

Even if you're trying to remain objective, even if you're trying not to mount any campaigns or endorse anything, when you cover an issue you are at least encouraging people to think about all the possibilities and if you're not covering political reform, electoral reform, you can write stories about them that don't say we must do this but just educate people on the fact that there are various advocates who are tugging us in that direction, that can present the arguments of those advocates, and I do think that's an issue we for some reason completely turned away from.

Shiatsu, deep-tissue or maybe even Rolfing: Which manner of pummeling becomes a cephalopod most?

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.

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.

I don't know that it's a lack of creativity so much as it is , a lack of resources. And maybe a little bit of a lack of will but when you look at what fills every hour, let's just take CNN as an example, not because I think they're particularly egregious, but, they're sort of the ongoing hour, hour, hour. Why do they give us bulletins every single day on the latest poll? Very easy to cover a poll, right?

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

You don't feel you have the same voice in a presidential election if you live in a solid blue or a solid red state. I also don't think we've educated voters well on the different ways in which primaries work in different states. It doesn't need to be the case that you end up with one Democrat and one Republican, you have open primaries, you can have jungle primaries. There are various permutations and combinations of how to do this.

I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn't cling to extremes. He surveys the scenery and makes sure his outfit doesn't clash.

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.

We still write too many stories that are "state of the race" stories that are informed almost solely by what the polling shows and by what we're then deducing about who's up, who's down, and I'm just not sure that's very helpful to readers, it certainly doesn't elevate the debate and, and the problem is if you, if you cover these things, and I don't think the Times is particularly culpable, I think other news organizations are worse, if you cover them in an entirely "who's up, who's down" horse race way.

I do think we're in a little bit of a bubble and I think you saw it this year primarily in the fact that everyone was surprised by Donald Trump's success. He was saying things and he was tapping into feelings and resentments in the electorate that the media was almost completely blindsided by. And that suggests we are not spending enough time talking to people out there who are living the lives and feeling the problems that led them to Donald Trump.

Another way in which our system is unfair. Why do Iowans get so much of a bigger voice every four years than everybody else? Ditto for New Hampshire. There are proposals and it could well happen that we could have a rotating calendar where different years different states went first. I would endorse that.

We have Americans who are voting for someone in whom they have confidence, about whom they have hope, because at after the election 2016 whoever wins is going to have to govern. And when you look at the tenor of this campaign, and when you look at the way people feel about these candidates and how partisan our country is for starters, how does the winner govern? I mean that's the real, real problem.

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.

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.

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.

I think what we journalists too often do is we assume the status quo is unchangeable. I think all sorts of issues of political reform, electoral reform need more discussion than they get.