A woman I had dinner with the other night said to me that the atmosphere in this country since the Persian Gulf war is like that at a party in a beautiful home, with everybody being polite and bubbly. And there is this stink coming from somewhere, getting worse all the time, and nobody wants to be the first to mention it.— KURT VONNEGUT, Letter to the editor, New York Times, March 27, 1991On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump visited the offices of The New York Times for an on-the-record interview with some of the paper’s top reporters, editors and columnists. The meeting was widely covered, both in the paper and elsewhere, as suggesting that the Trump was “moderating” some of...
