Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.

That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).

This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:

I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually true, but I wouldn’t use those words. I would say that our institutions are structurally (and, I believe, catastrophically) maladapted to the new information environment, and that the people who run them are both unable and unwilling to reform them.