Glad That One's Over

Like a man who's had a thoroughly unsatisfying breakfast, and sees no great prospects for lunch.

John Oliver:

However, Vox begs to differ:

To get help making sense of all these upheavals and tragedies, I reached out to Harvard psychology professor and polymath Steven Pinker. A cognitive scientist and linguist, Pinker focused his study of human nature on our propensity for violence — and conversely, cooperation — in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In the book, Pinker meticulously documented a steady decline in violence over the past several centuries, which, he writes, "may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species."

In August, he told me the world is still in a more peaceful period than at any other time in history. (You can read the whole conversation here.) A few days ago, I reached out to him again. I wanted to see how Pinker was looking back over the year that was 2016 — if the election of Trump, and all the global violence that followed, had changed anything. The email conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

But then again, these things run in cycles - and we're only just now entering the Trump Era - so there's always a fair chance for the whole thing to go straight into the shitter after all.