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(An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)

Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year

the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.

none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.

This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.

To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.

Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.

Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.

This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.

I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.

In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”

These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.

I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.

And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.

Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.

Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.

, we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.

politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth

Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.

As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.

And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.

When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.

when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!

By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.

in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.

2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.

So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.

Surely Trump and his advisers know it, too. Blustering his way through rallies and interviews with his mix of insult comedy and unrestrained id has earned Trump plenty of media attention and helped him solidify his reputation as the guy who bucks the establishment and doesn’t worry about policy specifics. He obviously believes that approach will appeal to voters who, as TV viewers, have long been energized by outspoken truth-tellers. So far, he’s been absolutely right.

Which all may explain why many people have been observing Trump, and the election in general, with an LOL sort of detachment. The primaries and caucuses notwithstanding, it’s still early, and many of us have engaged with the political theater the same way we engage with reality TV.

This is how we tend to process most things as a culture these days.

So having a reality-TV celebrity running for commander in chief may subconsciously signal our brains to participate in this election the same way we’ve grown accustomed to consuming reality shows: not as if they’re real, as Omarosa suggests,but instead believing that none of it is genuine, that none of it has any actual consequences.

bruise, brown, wilt, oxidize, ding, or discolor and that is apparently something American shoppers will not abide. For an American family of four, the average value of discarded produce is nearly $1,600 annually

(Globally, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one-third of all food grown is lost or wasted, an amount valued at nearly $3 trillion. )

“Grocery stores routinely trash produce for being the wrong shape or containing minor blemishes,

“Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the U.S. are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfill, because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards.”

“In my mind, the desire for perfect produce came about in the 1940s as housewives adapted to widespread refrigeration and new CPG [consumer packaged goods] products,”

Perfection and manicured foods came to represent safety and new technology.

this obsession might become amplified in an era of high foodie-ism and Instagram where a sort of heirloom airbrushing has taken hold. Writing in The Times in 2014, Pete Wells christened the extension of this phenomenon in restaurants as “camera cuisine,”

in the last year, ‘foodies’ and chefs have catapulted the issue of food waste into popular conversations,” she adds, naming initiatives by chefs and public intellectuals such as Dan Barber and Roy Choi as well as the pu pu platter of coverage of the issue in elite food magazines.

start-ups like the Bay Area’s Imperfect Produce are starting to deliver ugly but otherwise consumable goods at a discount

France has banned supermarkets from throwing away food by directing them to compost or donate all expiring or unsold food.

Germany is focusing on the issue in part by reforming expiration dates, which many argue are arbitrary and problematic.

“My hope is that as food education proliferates, so will an appreciation for ugly fruits and veggies, biodiversity, local crops, and so much more, all of which can help mitigate food waste,”

“Wouldn't it be neat if the power of Instagram was used to share recipes for carrot top pesto and food scrap stock? Or if we had easy-to-use apps for sharing extra produce with neighbors or food pantries? Both ideas I've already seen foodies fiddling with.”

We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower

more than the bandwidth or the stagnant hardware, I think the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of the business model. The dominant idea has been to gather users and get them to pour their friends, photos, writing, information, clicks, and locations into your app. Then you sell them stuff (Amazon.com, One King's Lane) or you take that data and sell it in one way or another to someone who will sell them stuff (everyone). I return to Jeff Hammerbacher's awesome line about developers these days: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." 

On the mobile side, we're working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That's the palette that everyone has been working with -- and I hate to say it, but we're at the end of the line.

despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most

Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.

The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean.

“The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst who led the survey. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.” Indeed, the basic menu for the Kindle Fire offers links to video, apps, the Web, music, newsstand and books, effectively making books (once Amazon’s stock in trade) just another menu option

Forrester said that it was more likely that tablets would eventually edge out black-and-white e-readers. “The historical precedent suggests that’s the case,” he said, citing the Palm Pilot, digital point-and-shoot cameras and portable GPS systems for the car as items that have been gradually displaced by multifunction devices. “There’s less and less reason to have these as stand-alone devices.

For Erin Faulk, a 29-year-old legal assistant and voracious reader in Los Angeles, the era of e-readers has had one major effect: she has accumulated many more books that she categorizes as “DNFs” — Did Not Finish. But she is also buying more books, she said, and she thinks that all the interruptions have, in a way, made her a more discerning reader.

NewCo will emulate the founders of The Atlantic. At some point "independent from" turned into "objective about." That was the wrong turn, made long ago, by professional journalism, American-style.

You've written that The View From Nowhere is, in part, a defense mechanism against charges of bias originating in partisan politics. If you won't be invoking it, what will your defense be when those charges happen? There are two answers to that. 1) We told you where we're coming from. 2) High standards of verification. You need both.

If it works out as you hope, if things are implemented well, etc., what's the potential payoff for readers? I think it's three things: First, this is a news site that is born into the digital world, but doesn't have to return profits to investors. That's not totally unique

The basic insight is correct: Since "news judgment" is judgment, the product is improved when there are multiple perspectives at the table ... But, if the people who are recruited to the newsroom because they add perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked are also taught that they should leave their politics at the door, or think like professional journalists rather than representatives or their community, or privilege something called "news values" over the priorities they had when they decided to become journalists, then these people are being given a fatally mixed message, if you see what I mean. They are valued for the perspective they bring, and then told that they should transcend that perspective.

When people talk about objectivity in journalism they have many different things in mind. Some of these I have no quarrel with. You could even say I’m a “fan.” For example, if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes. 

By "we can do better than that" I mean: We can insist on the struggle to tell it like it is without also insisting on the View from Nowhere. The two are not connected. It was a mistake to think that they necessarily are. But why was this mistake made? To control people in the newsroom from "above." That's a big part of objectivity. Not truth. Control.

What about ideological diversity? The View from Somewhere obviously permits it. You've said you'll have it. Is that because it is valuable in itself?

Second: It's going to be a technology company as much as a news organization. That should result in better service.

a good formula for innovation is to start with something people want to do and eliminate some of the steps required to do it

The third upside is news with a human voice restored to it. This is the great lesson that blogging gives to journalism

On Sept. 30, Congress passed legislation extending a special visa program for Iraqis. That a Congress seemingly incapable of accomplishing anything unanimously passed this bill just before the government shutdown is encouraging, but legislation meant to improve the special visa system for Afghans remains up in the air.

Amin was probably as indispensable to those other Marines as he was to me. And if our leaders would apply the same sort of focus and industriousness to the special visa program that Amin applies every day to the war effort they oversee, perhaps they could prevent any more of our linguists from being dishonored on Facebook.

“The drones are like the angels of death,” said Nazeer Gul, a shopkeeper in Miram Shah. “Only they know when and where they will strike.”

Their claims of distress are now being backed by a new Amnesty International investigation that found, among other points, that at least 19 civilians in the surrounding area of North Waziristan had been killed in just two of the drone attacks since January 2012

And on Friday, the drone debate is scheduled to spill onto the floor of the United Nations, whose officials have recently published reports that attacked America’s lack of transparency over drones.

Even when the missiles do not strike, buzzing drones hover day and night, scanning the alleys and markets with roving high-resolution cameras.

In theory, the Pakistani security forces should be in charge.

Unusually for the overall American drone campaign, the strikes in the area mostly occur in densely populated neighborhoods. The drones have hit a bakery, a disused girls’ school and a money changers’ market, residents say.

include eyewitness descriptions accompanied by borrowed footage of a fetus dying in a metal bowl

goal is to conceal the fact that late-term abortions offend the conscience when discussed or displayed with anything like journalistic accuracy

videos weren't merely "edited" but "highly edited."

the videos were "misleadingly edited" and "inaccurate."

Any less than 23m is unsafe, they warn. Also, stop staring at your camera or phone, be aware of your surroundings, and know that Yellowstone’s wild animals are free to roam where they please.

Some who encounter bears in Yello

wstone aren’t so fortunate. Grizzly and black bears have killed more than 40 people in Yellowstone in the past 30 years.

“It is all an act. It is a show,” said Alaa Hamam, 38, a Cairo University employee joining a protest in Tahrir Square, the symbolic heart of the uprising. “It is a provocation.”

Against an opaque backdrop of military rule, in which the generals, prosecutors and judges were all appointed by Mr. Mubarak, the degree of judicial independence is impossible to know. Demonstrators slammed the decision as a ruse designed to placate them without holding anyone accountable for the violence or corruption of the old government.

In the parking lot outside the makeshift courthouse in a police academy, some initially celebrated the verdict. “I am so happy — this is the greatest happiness I have ever felt,” said Rada Mohamed Mabrouk, a 60-year-old retiree. “The martyrs are all of our children.”

He called Mr. Mubarak’s tenure “30 years of intense darkness — black, black, black, the blackness of a chilly winter night.”

As Mr. Mubarak’s last prime minister, Mr. Shafik presided over the cabinet when the police failed to protect unarmed protesters in Tahrir Square from a deadly assault by a mob of Mubarak supporters known as the “battle of the camels.”

“The verdict means that the head of the regime and the minister of interior are the only ones who have fallen, but the rest of the entire regime remains,” the Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group, said in a statement.” It added, “The Egyptian people have to sense the great danger that threatens their revolution and their hopes, and wastes the blood of the martyrs and the sacrifices of their children.”

Both sons stood in front of their father to try to shield him from the cameras. Alaa Mubarak appeared to recite verses from the Koran as the verdict was read. And after the ruling, both sons had tears in their eyes. They remain in jail while they face charges in an unrelated stock-manipulation case announced last week.

The judge dismissed the corruption charges against Mr. Mubarak and his sons on the grounds that a statute of limitations had expired since the three Mubaraks were said to have received the vacation homes. Prosecutors had evidently hoped to date the crime from the subsequent favors Mr. Mubarak did for Mr. Salem. It was unclear why the judge had not raised the statute of limitations issue earlier.

by adding native photo and video sharing and moving people over to its own Web and client experiences, Twitter is positioned like never before to capitalize on that content and keep people on its site, and in turn challenge Facebook where it dominates like no other: Engagement.

Instead of creating and consuming photos and videos on third-party sites -- something that's already hugely popular on Twitter and is Facebook's No. 1 time sink -- users will be doing it on Twitter.com.

The deadline is the first milestone of a deal to rid Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal by the middle of 2014.

Western powers said only Syrian government forces could have carried out the attack, but President Bashar al-Assad blamed rebel fighters.

Under the international disarmament plan, US satellites and Chinese surveillance cameras are to track the progress of Russian armoured lorries as they carry the chemical weapons from 12 storage sites in Syria to Latakia, on Syria's Mediterranean coast.

Danish and Norwegian cargo ships will then transport the chemicals to a port in Italy, where they will be loaded on to the US Maritime Administration vessel MV Cape Ray and taken out into international waters before being destroyed by hydrolysis.

reports that the European ships are docked in Limassol, Cyprus on the day they are supposed to be escorting Syria's most dangerous chemicals out of the country.

The vessels left Limassol on Saturday but turned back on Tuesday after the hazardous containers failed to arrive for collection in Latakia. Now the plan is to refuel in Limassol before returning to sea in the coming days.

Co-operation on the chemical weapons removal programme was seen by many of those involved as a potential catalyst for broader peace negotiations in Syria.

Failing to meet this ambitious target, our correspondent adds, will demonstrate the difficulties involved in operating in a country with constantly changing frontlines - even with an international mandate and co-operation from President Assad.

"A number of external factors have impacted upon timelines, not least the continuing volatility in overall security conditions, which have constrained planned movements," a statement said.

The joint mission also noted that the Syrian government had met the 1 November deadline to destroy critical chemical weapons production equipment, which meant it could no longer weaponise the chemical agents at its storage facilities.

But deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf also acknowledged that it was a "complicated process", adding: "As long as we see forward progress, that what's most important here."

activists said a missile fired by government forces hit a bus in Aleppo, killing at least 10 people.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the dead included two children and that the missile was fired from a plane.

The film succeeded at doing that through a comic lens—the very thing that initially troubled me.

Wisely, Anderson avoided the war itself and its mass murder, setting his film in the period before and after instead.

A similar subtlety also characterizes the film’s musings about memory and its transmission. Zero flashes back to the 1930s from the vantage point of his 1968 conversation with a writer he meets. But the 1968 meeting is itself a flashback—it's introduced and concluded by the writer, years later, looking at the camera and describing his recollections of the meeting. And that too is a flashback: The movie opens and closes with a student seated before the writer’s memorial bust in the Prague Jewish cemetery reading those very recollections in the writer’s book, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In a month when we all thought a lot about preserving history, that rendering of how stories are passed down resonated deeply.

Finally, the film speaks to our heartbreak at the injustice of the Holocaust and our desire for some glimmer of light—but not too much.

“You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” The Grand Budapest Hotel got that just right too, and that’s no laughing matter.

The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003

Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” said Jarrod Lampier, a recently retired Army major who was present for the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war: more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets unearthed in 2006 at a former Republican Guard compound.

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

Since June, the compound has been held by the Islamic State, the world’s most radical and violent jihadist group. In a letter sent to the United Nations this summer, the Iraqi government said that about 2,500 corroded chemical rockets remained on the grounds, and that Iraqi officials had witnessed intruders looting equipment before militants shut down the surveillance cameras.

The kidnappings, which were carried out by different groups of fighters jousting for influence and territory in Syria, became more frequent. In June 2013, four French journalists were abducted. In September, the militants grabbed three Spanish journalists.

At first, the abuse did not appear to have a larger purpose. Nor did the jihadists seem to have a plan for their growing number of hostages.Mr. Bontinck said Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie had first been held by the Nusra Front, a Qaeda affiliate. Their guards, an English-speaking trio whom they nicknamed “the Beatles,” seemed to take pleasure in brutalizing them.Later, they were handed over to a group called the Mujahedeen Shura Council, led by French speakers.Mr. Foley and Mr. Cantlie were moved at least three times before being transferred to a prison underneath the Children’s Hospital of Aleppo.

but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.

When Mr. Bontinck was released, he jotted down the phone number of Mr. Foley’s parents and promised to call them. They made plans to meet again.He left thinking that the journalists, like him, would soon be freed.

After months of holding them without making any demands, the jihadists suddenly devised a plan to ransom them. Starting last November, each prisoner was told to hand over the email address of a relative. Mr. Foley gave the address of his younger brother.The group sent a blitz of messages to the families of the hostages.Those who were able to lay the emails side by side could see they had been cut and pasted from the same template.

Within this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.

Mr. Foley shared his meager rations. In the cold of the Syrian winter, he offered another prisoner his only blanket.He kept the others entertained, proposing games and activities like Risk, a board game that involves moving imaginary armies across a map: another favorite pastime in the Foley family. The hostages made a chess set out of discarded paper. They re-enacted movies, retelling them scene by scene. And they arranged for members of the group to give lectures on topics they knew well.

By June, the cellblock that had once held at least 23 people had been reduced to just seven. Four of them were Americans, and three were British — all citizens of countries whose governments had refused to pay ransoms.