The dead whale that fetched up in the bay near our house at some point during the past weekend has drawn considerable attention, as dead whales do. 

I had first heard about it from Harvey Bennett, who left a phone message after spotting the floating carcass from across the bay. Baymen like Harvey know to watch for the workings of gulls, which are clues, if one knows how to read them, about what is happening beneath the surface.

From our staircase down to Gardiner’s Bay and through an old pair of binoculars, it was obvious that something big was out there, off toward Promised Land. Evvy, our 11-year-old, and I got in the car for a closer look. From the beach about a quarter mile east, we could confirm that the object was indeed a whale. Gulls stood on its exposed belly, probing for soft spots where they might find an easy meal.

It is difficult to say exactly what the fascination is, but my guess is that we humans are amazed by the sheer improbability of whales, their size, that they can live scores of years, that they can exist at all. Aside from the creatures that can be visited at aquariums, very few of us will ever have a chance to see a whale up close, unless it is dead and washed by the wind to a shore.

The arrival of an almost next-door whale provides an opportunity for me to point out that the body of water in which it rested is Gardiner’s Bay. Steve Russell Boerner, a part-time archivist at the East Hampton Library, and I have been preparing documentation for the United States Board on Geographic Place Names to correct what we see a misconception stemming from a 1956 fieldwork error, which has been repeated and now popularized by Google and other online mapping services. Napeague Bay, by which this section of water is frequently identified, begins a good distance off to the east.

According to the best sources that Steve and I have been able to assemble, Gardiner’s Bay ends at a line that can be imagined running from Goff Point roughly north-northwest to Cartwright Shoal on the southern tip of Gardiner’s Island. One interesting bit of evidence we have found is a resolution by the East Hampton Town Trustees in the late 19th century to hire a lawyer to deal with squatters on Hicks Island, which, as the record indicates, was said at the time to divide Gardiner’s Bay from Napeague Harbor. Today’s town officials concur, and we await the final decision of the place-names board.

Promised Land, where the whale was stuck aground early this week, is squarely in Gardiner’s Bay. My father, his grandfather Everett J. Edwards, and his great-grandfather Joshua Bennett Edwards would have known this. E.J. and Josh were whaling men and would have made quick work of the whale, I’d guess. Today, it is mostly a curiosity, if one that makes us think for a minute about things bigger and far more mysterious than ourselves.

“You’ve met everyone!” Durell Godfrey exclaimed last Thursday, just after the editorial meeting and moments before the bombshell tossed by TMZ, the celebrity-gossip website, landed in the office: Prince was dead. 

Durell was referring to the actor Peter Dinklage, whom I have not actually met, and three of the four Beatles. 

I must plead guilty to serial name-dropping, though. John and Paul and Ringo, Elton John, Mary J. Blige. It’s all in my first book, “Into the Twilight,” a collection of these “Relay”s that is available at Amazon, BookBaby, and elsewhere in cyberspace (call me for a print copy).

But it’s true, I have been fortunate to meet a lot of people I admire, and some other noteworthy people, too. Keith Richards, B.B. King, Donovan, Ziggy Marley, D.J. Fontana, Graham Nash, Ron Wood, Warren Haynes, Norah Jones, Percy Heath, Suzanne Vega, Ace Frehley, Don Was, Billy Joel, John Mayer, Bootsy Collins, Ray Manzarek, and Glenn Tilbrook come to mind. Telephone conversations with Chuck Berry, Brian Wilson, Bill Wyman, Quincy Jones, Mickey Hart, Billy Bob Thornton, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, Robert Cray, Steve Earle, Lou Reed, Jorma Kaukonen, Jimmy Vaughan, Zakk Wylde. 

I haven’t had a television for four years now, and I don’t miss it at all. Today’s “smart” TVs surpass my understanding, and anyway, all things audio and video have converged in my iMac. Programming like the cable news channels, “The Daily Show,” and, sometimes, baseball games are there, along with multiple lifetimes’ worth of musical video content on YouTube. What’s more, the tyranny of cable TV is fading as devices like Apple TV allow a la carte selection from a growing body of content. 

Cooler still, HBO NOW allows anyone with an Internet connection to access its programming on a computer or mobile device. I signed up specifically to watch “Vinyl,” a series focusing on the music business, in all its sleazy glory, circa 1973. 

As colleagues who were in the business at the time attest, those were the days. My years at Billboard and another trade magazine in New York City weren’t quite so wild as that depicted in “Vinyl,” but there are some parallels. I’ll neither confirm nor deny participation in backstage high jinks at a few Black Crowes concerts. Ditto for an impromptu encounter with Levon Helm and Hubert Sumlin at the Beacon Theatre. It’s all in my rock ’n’ roll memoir, available wherever unpublished books are sold. (Note to agents and publishers: Call me.) 

During that semi-freewheeling time, I used to haul the laundry down from my sixth-floor walkup in Williamsburg to a Laundromat on Bedford Avenue. It was a mind-numbing chore, but one incident, a dozen or so years ago, stands out. Somewhere between pulling the clothes out of washing machines, throwing them into dryers, and inserting another thousand quarters, a silly contretemps played out before me when a young woman began accusing another patron of removing her still-damp clothes from the dryers and stuffing them into one of the rolling baskets you find at such places. 

The accused, a dwarf, denied all charges, but the woman would have none of it. Of his guilt she was certain, and she yammered on about just how inconsiderate he was and terribly inconvenienced she was. Her life, in fact, was irrevocably ruined, if the incessant yap-yap was any indication. 

I felt terrible for the poor man. His life was already hard enough, I was sure. To now suffer the indignity of being yelled at, in public, by this entitled, impudent youngster? It was wrong, but I said nothing. 

A year or two later, I saw a preview for a film. I don’t remember its title or subject, but to my amazement, there he was, the dwarf from the Laundromat. He probably wasn’t dragging his laundry down Bedford Avenue anymore. His accuser? Toiling in obscurity to this day, I’d wager. 

Yes, I have HBO NOW, now, but have not seen even one of the 51 episodes of “Game of Thrones,” starring Mr. Dinklage. I’m afraid to start for fear I won’t be able to stop, and thus will not accomplish anything ever again.

I never did meet Prince, nor see him perform. But he did sit directly in front me at a Sheryl Crow concert at the Beacon in, I think, 1999. (Yes, I have met Sheryl Crow a couple of times, once in the defunct Hit Factory studios, where she recorded a duet with Tony Bennett [yes, I have met Tony Bennett] but was too shy to say more than hello.) 

Like Mr. Dinklage — well, not really like him — Prince was slight in stature, but the hoop earrings he wore were enormous and offset his otherwise understated attire. As Ms. Crow concluded the last song of her set, but before the encore, Prince and his companion(s) — one or two women, if memory serves — discreetly left the building. 

Maybe I should have said hello. 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.

Despite the howler monkeys in the trees and 84-degree ocean, Playa Guiones, Costa Rica, seems a whole lot like a tropical version of Montauk. This thought struck Lisa and me early during our vacation at this up-and-coming Pacific Coast resort town.

The similarities are both superficial and serious. There are surfers and a yoga crowd in Playa Guiones who have made a commitment to spending months upon months chasing their dreams. There are short-term visitors like us, grabbing hotel rooms for a week or two. And, to longer-lasting effect, the area has resident expats and an active investor and developer scene. Indeed, it seems that every other conversation I have heard in our week here has been about real estate or the opening of some new business.

The only locals a visitor generally encounters work in the visitor trade, the beach town itself appearing to be almost entirely a gringo creation. Which is not to say that Playa Guiones is bad — nor Montauk — but that the idealized version of the place presented through its creature comfort-centric commerce can be misleading.

There is an English-language newspaper here and its recent coverage has included stories about the region’s water supplies. As new businesses open and vacation houses, most with swimming pools, are built, demand has increased rapidly. Between an extra-dry dry season and extra consumption, Playa Guiones and the neighboring villages have had to endure nightly water interruptions to allow the system to refill. At a recent community meeting a mostly expat audience debated whether and how to add a new public well to improve the supply.

Bolinas, a Northern California surf town I visited not long ago, responded to a similar challenge decades ago by permanently capping the number of water meters. Long Island, where all the drinking water comes out of the ground, probably should have done something similar, but policymakers have tended to act as if the supply were infinite. A new state study, announced by the governor last month, might clarify the situation — if we’re lucky.

It’s hard to say whether Playa Guiones is overrun with visitors the way Montauk can be on certain summer weekends. Yet all the real estate signs, Airbnb rentals, surfing lessons, overpriced food, and various other for-profit schemes seem the same, and they are on a worrisome trajectory. Too much really can be too much, and I hope that whatever passes for a power structure here at least takes it slow.

I have my doubts, though. The Times Travel section did one of its breathless takes on Playa Guiones on Sunday, which can only mean one thing: More is ahead, and it’s not necessarily going to be good.

Nothing upsets me more about the nastiness coming from Donald J. Trump and Ted Cruz, the presumptive front-runners for the Republican nomination for president, than their idea that Muslims should be barred from entering the country. Jews were virtually barred once, too, and it wasn’t all that long ago.

Senator Cruz thinks only Christian Syrians should be allowed in, and he has the nonsensical idea that the more than four million Syrian refugees “should be resettled in the Middle East, in majority Muslim countries.” I am frightened by even a hint of a religious test for who should be admitted to this country not only because it is immoral, but because I am old enough to remember World War II. 

During his long tenure as president Franklin Roosevelt was held in high regard by my parents and just about everyone they knew. What they didn’t know was his failure to open America’s doors to European Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust. The Great Depression and fears that Jewish refugees might alternately become financial burdens on the state or take away jobs have been described as reasons why the American public did not favor admitting Jews. You can decide for yourself if religion had anything to do with it. 

The civilized world may not have been aware of Hitler’s “final solution” when German Jews were stripped of citizenship in 1935 or when on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, occurred, in which Jews were viciously attacked through­out Germany. But surely it was a warning of what was to come. 

President Roosevelt and the State Department were not moved. More than 300,000 mostly Jewish Germans applied for visas in 1939. Only a little over 20,000 were approved under the federal quota. 

The president remained silent when the St. Louis, a ship loaded with refugees seeking asylum in this country, was turned away, with concentration camps the eventual destination for many of those aboard. Nor did mounting evidence about the death camps sway American policy even after we entered the war. 

It wasn’t until 1944, and because of the intervention of a Jewish secretary of the treasury, Henry Morganthau Jr., that Roosevelt finally urged Congress “to take all measures . . . to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death.” 

My maternal grandfather, who had emigrated from eastern Europe long before I was born, warned me that I shouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. As a child during the war years, I was sure he was mistaken, but I came to understand why he thought as he did after the war, when a couple with tattooed numbers on their arms who survived a concentration camp came to live nearby. 

The process by which refugees are considered for resettling in the United States today is more humane, I suppose, although it takes between 18 months and two years. The United Nations Refugee Agency first refers people for United States visa consideration. By November of 2015, it had referred 22,427 Syrians, although only 2,290 were admitted to this country since 2011. With more than 4 million Syrians among other refugees seeking new lives, even President Obama’s suggestion that we take in 10,000 is paltry. 

I wonder what those in future generations will think of that.

One of the myths I’ve entertained over the years is that athletes are somehow immune when it comes to what can drag you down. 

Wasn’t it I who once said, “While my athletic days are pretty much over, I take comfort in the company of athletes, men and women, boys and girls, and like taking photos of them, deriving joy from the at times sublime headiness of sport, a headiness I’ve known running and playing, of being in the moment, when all within the realm of consciousness seemed, however briefly, perfect.”

And yet . . . and yet the list of athletes I’ve known or have known of, who’ve died before their time — by no means all because of depression, but a few of them — is steadily lengthening. John Villaplana, Brandon Hayes, Kendall Madison, Chris Schiaffino, Chris Cosich, Annette MacNiven, Andrew MacNiven, Steve Tarpinian, and now Mike Semkus come immediately to mind. So I am finally disabused of thinking that all athletes are forever blessed.

Jean Mellano, who lived more than 30 years with one of these outwardly buoyant souls assailed within by demons, has in a memoir of Steve Tarpinian called “Slipped Away” celebrated his successes (he was among triathlon’s founders on Long Island, in the early 1980s) and his kind spirit, while at the same time drawing attention to a painful disease, clinical depression, that if it is ever discussed is done so in lowered tones.

Knowing someone who is clinically depressed myself, I told her it was extraordinary, and a great testimony to his strength, that Steve, who took his life a year ago, at the age of 54, had in spite of his suffering accomplished so much. 

Having made a vocation of his avocation — something his friend Chuck Sperazza, a top amateur triathlete who’s won many times out here, said he envied — Steve Tarpinian joyously competed, in Hawaii, Lake Placid, and on Long Island, with his peers (just about always, as I recall, coming out of the water first, or very close to it), and vigorously promoted the multidisciplinary sport under the Event Power and Team Total Training banners, setting numerous students, many of whom at first didn’t think they had it in them, on their way to triathletic careers. He himself had 18 Ironmans (in Hawaii and Lake Placid) and 17 Xterra championships to his credit. 

“Slipped Away” abounds in testimonials from peers, Dave Scott, John Howard, and Scott Tinley among them, and from students.

“Steve encouraged, motivated, and helped people to realize their own dreams,” Jen Gatz said in thanking him “for passing on your enthusiasm and positivity. I can’t help but notice that those touched by you continue to spread that message.”

“He left a legacy and set a standard for us all to live up to, of giving, sharing, smiling, hoping, believing, and then giving again,” said Al Lyman.

“I always wanted to do my best for him,” said Nancy Burpee, a U.S. Paralympics pool racer. “Everyone did. He brought that out of you.”

“You’ve inspired me, intimidated me, encouraged me, drafted me, beaten me, congratulated me, and handed me trophies — all the time making me feel better about me,” said Ric Stott on learning of Steve Tarpinian’s death. “After lifting so many spirits, it’s so confusing to hear that you struggled with yours.”

The memoir is available through SlippedAway.org. Most of the profits, Ms. Mellano has said, are to go to a Long Island veterans organization, Project Nine Line, perhaps toward the development of a program that helps returning veterans overcome post-traumatic stress disorder, or to help an individual know that he or she is not alone in confronting depression and suicidal thoughts.

It is time — long past time — that the subject come out of hiding and into the open.

It would be going too far to say that my husband and I are cutthroat when it comes to the online challenge called Trivia Today. Intense would be more like it. 

Okay, maybe just a little . . . bloodthirsty.

Every morning and afternoon we check our computers for the day’s two questions. Before the sun goes down, one of us is sure to ask the other — always off-handedly, though a smirk or a scowl is riding on the answer — “So, how’d you do on Trivia Today?”

We’ve been competing in this maddening game — which is sort of like “Jeopardy,” only you get four possible answers to choose from — for about two years now. The enigmatic scoring chart, with 100 tops, has had us since January at 62 and 65, which is better than it sounds; the average score out there in virtual gameland is 49. Sidney had a long string of right answers recently, but it takes forever to gain a point and his number never budged, which has not improved dinnertime. “I don’t understand it,” he grouses. “Why aren’t I moving up?”

Most of the relationships of the long-married couples I know, and we are talking golden anniversary-plus here, seem to me to tilt almost soppily solicitous or — not so much. I met one woman in Florida this winter who was playing this same trivia game with her husband and confided that she was deliberately giving the wrong dumb answers to make him happy, and another who cuts the Times crossword puzzle out of the paper every morning and makes a copy of it for her husband before he wakes up. Then they have a battle over coffee to see who finishes first. They’ve been keeping score forever.

“Who’s ahead?” I asked her.

“Oh, I am. And you can tell him I told you.”

The best thing about Trivia Today is that you learn a lot of stuff that seems useless at the moment but that might come in handy sometime. The first job I ever had, as assistant humor editor of a long-defunct magazine called Coronet, was like that. Coronet was the Avis of the day to the Reader’s Digest’s Hertz. We ran a column like the Digest’s “Life in These United States” where people would write in with funny things that had really happened, only we paid $25 and they paid $100.

Nine out of 10 submissions were handwritten, often in pencil. My job was mainly to decipher the chicken scratches, but also to pick out candidates for publication, and then the humor editor (a beyond-crabby woman who never cracked a smile) would decide who’d win.

Within a few months of starting work, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to plow through the whole letter, just skip to the punchline at the end. “No, 40 children are enough.” Yup, we’ve run that one already. It was as if there were only a finite number of comical things happening in America. By 11 a.m. the day’s work was done. 

Pretty soon I had hundreds of funny stories by heart, and oh boy, what that job did for me. “That reminds me of a joke,” I’d say. All of a sudden I was the life of the party.

But I digress. You know what I’ve really learned from playing Trivia Today? That a lot of us never listened to anything we were told in school. 

How else could you miss a question like the one we had on March 15: “Who was famously killed on the Ides of March?” 

Remember, you get four choices. Seventy percent of respondents got Julius Caesar. Four percent guessed John F. Kennedy. Thirteen percent picked Joan of Arc. 

Trumpists.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

East Hampton has 1,000 tons of compost it can’t get rid of.   A couple of weeks back, officials sent out a notice announcing the town had a large amount unscreened compost to unload. The stuff had accumulated at the recycling center, the end product of all the lawn clippings, leaves, and brush that flow into the place, which are run through a giant grinder and left to mulch. Visitors to the so-called dump can see it for themselves — a long, tall mound of steaming dark-brown, almost black soil. 

Homeowners and landscapers know all about the town’s compost. Though it is thought not to be all that good for growing edible crops, it is terrific for sweetening up portions of a tired lawn or ornamental plantings. For a modest fee, workers at the recycling center will put a load in the back of a pickup truck for commercial landscapers or gardeners; permit-holders with a few bins to fill can do so at no charge, as I understand it.

However, when the supply reaches the hundreds or thousands of tons, the town has a problem. No one responded to its request for bids to buy the stuff, and earlier this month the Purchasing Department had the matter tabled during a town board meeting.

Compost is not the town’s only recycling headache. Because market prices for the products it collects have gone up and down over the years, it sometimes costs more for the town to deal with the material than it can receive from buyers.

That said, it is better in dollar terms for the town to hold down the volume of solid waste of any sort that it collects and has to haul away. Yard waste and tree trimmings ground into compost represent that much less that has to be sent to a distant landfill or incinerator.

Even if difficult to get rid of when the supply piles up, the composting program is a net benefit for taxpayers. And while we might not be able to take care of that 1,000 tons all on our own, a bucket-load here and there that any of us can take and use at home helps out.

“Estoy feliz que Mexico no ha construido un muro contra noso­tros!” I said to the taxi driver as we arrived at the Las Brisas hotel outside Zihuatenejo.

He laughed, as had been my intention in saying I was glad Mexico had not built a wall to keep us tourists out. On that note, we began a week’s stay at the closest thing we’ve come to paradise on this earth, there being nothing to do there but read and swim and speak bad Spanish to the unfailingly pleasant staff, a wonderfully captive audience. 

And yet, even though I felt more at ease than ever with the language, to the extent that I was able to frequently get orange juice mixed in with my margaritas, and to make some headway in proposing that the name of Isaias Ochoa Hernandez, a former Las Brisas lifeguard who began protecting baby sea turtles there years ago, be added to the hotel’s history of the project, a history proudly affixed to a stone wall near the beach, it’s Mary who always received the compliments — heeding apparently the advice of my father that all one needed to say in French was thank you and goodbye, “merci” and “au revoir.”

In her case it’s “gracias” and “lo siento,” to which she adds, apologetically, “Mi espanol es muy mal,” invariably prompting her interlocutor to declaim, “No, no, senora, you speak very well! You speak very well!”

“I’m better than her in tennis, she’s better than me in swimming, and we’re tied in Ping-Pong,” I said to a waiter who had noted we were sporty. I forgot to add that she killed me in backgammon — thankful that I wasn’t that fluent.

For exercise, though, you needn’t do anything more than climb up and down Las Brisas’s steep stone stairs that lead through jungly growth to the pools, the tennis courts, the beach, and, if you’re of a mind, to the lobby, about as high up on the cliff into which the hotel is built as a sacrificial Aztec or Mayan altar. 

“It was like Syphilis,” I said, panting, to Mary following one of my steep ascents. “Sisyphus, rather. . . . You know, Robert Graves [no relation] says he was known as the worst knave on earth for promoting only Corinthian commerce and navigation.”

That reminded me of a certain knave on the earth now, though I held my tongue, not wanting our bliss to go amiss.

Talking to my sister-in-law Linda the other day the subject turned to trip-planning.

“I leave that to John,” she said.

“It’s just the opposite with us,” I said. “I leave it [and many other things] to Mary. As you know, I can’t hear very well, and I’m not very good with computers. My finger might slip and we’d find ourselves booked on a flight to Afghanistan.”

That had her in stitches, which is good because she’s recovering from a painful ankle injury, and so I continued. “Last night, I was looking over the itinerary for Georgie and Mary’s flight to Raleigh-Durham this weekend, and I found that they were going to stop first in. . . .”

“In Baltimore?”

“No, not Baltimore, in Orlando! Go figure. It was the first Mary’d heard of it. She was not pleased. ‘They told us we wouldn’t be changing planes,’ she said, retrieving the printouts from me. ‘I knew something was strange when it said the flight would take five hours and five minutes. Raleigh-Durham’s not that far away as the crow flies.’ ”

“Then I looked at the rental car details. And I saw that they were to pick up the car at Islip at 1 p.m. Friday and return it there at 7:30 p.m. Sunday! That didn’t sound right at all, and I told her so. She was incredulous, and, once she’d seen that it actually said what I said it said, nonplussed. ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! After flying down to Orlando and back, there would have been no car for us in Raleigh-Durham! They would have put us on a bus. What is wrong with these people!’ ”

“ ‘You can’t trust anybody,’ I said. ‘Nobody.’ ”

“After she’d gotten the car rental details straightened out, she thanked me profusely (which of course raised my self-esteem) and, reasoning that obviously she was now among those legions not to be trusted, said she would entrust me with the planning of our next trip. Brimming with diffidence, I said I would rise to the occasion . . . once the puppy we’re to get soon were raised.”

I ought to be able to find a travel agent by then. I trust the species is not utterly extinct. I think I heard someone say one had been spotted the other day at the Morton Wildlife Refuge. And there’s a rumor that there’s a mating pair at Mashomack.

Maybe it’s a good thing that interest in the presidential election has been revved up by one candidate who denigrates so many people — targeting them by place of origin, religion, and sex — while another foments revolution (albeit a peaceful one). Everyone I know keeps talking about the primaries.

I cannot believe disrespect and name-calling are good for democracy, but if more of the electorate turns out in November as a result, we might be able to say that this cloud of national humiliation has had a silver lining.

A report on voter turnout in national elections between 2000 and 2012, from an organization called the Bipartisan Policy Center, showed it “dipped from 62.3 percent of eligible citizens voting in 2008 to an estimated 57.5 in 2012. That figure was also below the 60.4 level of the 2004 election but higher than the 54.2 percent turnout in the 2000 election.” So it seems that somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of voters were the decision-makers in those years. 

Of course, a simple majority hasn’t always assured national election. In 2000, Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president, lost in the Electoral College after Florida’s 25 electoral votes were awarded to George W. Bush in a 5-to-4 Su­preme Court decision. That then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor voted with the majority was considered the deciding factor. Mr. Gore had won the popular vote, although by only a very small percentage; Ralph Nader had won almost 3 percent of the vote and was probably the spoiler rather than Justice O’Connor. In addition to talking about the primaries, friends and relatives who admit to being surprised by the size of Donald Trump’s and Bernie Sanders’s support have found it amusing to take something called the Bubble Quiz. According to their score on 25 questions, they were able to find out if they lived “cloistered together . . . with little to no exposure to American culture at large.” 

The quiz was devised by Charles Murray, a well-known political scientist and author who describes himself as a libertarian. He was recently interviewed about it by Paul Solman on the PBS NewsHour.

The Bubble Quiz questions range from “Have you ever walked on a factory floor?” and “Have you ever had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day?” to whether you have seen certain popular movies or eaten in certain chain restaurants. If you are interested in finding out where you score, it’s easy to find on the NewsHour website.

I myself took the quiz earlier today, but didn’t find it particularly enlightening. I guess I’m already aware that I live in a bubble of privilege. Also, I am not entirely sure that Mr. Murray is an oracle on what constitutes “American culture at large.” Still, if those who took the quiz were a fair sample of the voting public, and if their answers were carefully analyzed, perhaps it might serve as a barometer of the next election.

What we all know for sure is that the electorate is deeply divided, and that the societal culture gap is real. Trump and Sanders are only making that division so obvious we cannot ignore it any longer.