Riccardo Manzotti: For most people “consciousness” will have various meanings and include awareness, self-awareness, thinking in language. But for philosophers and neuroscientists the crucial meaning is that of feeling something, having a feeling you might say, or an experience. It’s all very problematic. The truth is that we do not know what consciousness is. That’s why we’re talking about it as a problem.

All of us who are familiar with rural areas and former industrial towns in this country know the impoverishment and hopelessness of many men and women who live there. Understandably, they are angry. These unfortunates, who’ve been cheated and swindled by bosses, mortgage banks, and both political parties, have put all their hopes in a billionaire who has a long record of not paying taxes, cheating his workers and contractors out of their pay, and seemingly using his own “charitable” foundation as a slush fund. They voted for a buffoon who doesn’t care whether they live or die.

There is plenty to be afraid of about Trump’s economic plans. It could well be that the new administration, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, will start cutting needed social services to the bone. So why has the stock market been soaring since two days after the election? Investors apparently have concluded that the economy can grow faster if the deficit grows, even if it leads to higher inflation and interest rates. This is exactly the fiscal medicine many liberals had been advocating.

Consider the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page. It is small; it does not call attention to itself; it is missed by many insistent readers as they chase the progress of a story across columns and ads. It is kin to the textual space filler at the bottom of a page, but its language is visual. Some of Richard McGuire’s sequences are taxonomies: bird cages, hats, ice, or the collection of wire shapes that decorates the front matter of this book. They manage to be at once witty and somehow scientific, and you might wish there were a hundred examples rather than just seven.

Although America long ago had a Virginia architect as president—Thomas Jefferson—never until this year had someone reached its highest office from the considerably less elevated realms of New York real-estate development, Atlantic City casinos, and TV reality shows. Grotesque though the rise of Donald Trump has seemed to many, his political ascendance has struck those of us who love architecture as a particularly personal affront, given our familiarity with his forty-year record as the foremost architectural schlockmeister and urban design vulgarian of his generation.

Since the failed coup of July 15, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been conducting a campaign of repression. Turks have reacted to what is but one more assault on freedom of expression with resignation; while the international response has been muted. What does all this mean for a Donald Trump presidency?

Will Trump be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change treaty responsibilities; expanding libel law; criminalizing abortion; jailing his political opponents; supporting aggressive stop-and-frisk policing; reviving mass surveillance and torture? Whether Trump will actually try to implement his proposed plans, and more importantly, whether he will succeed if he does try, lies as much in our hands as in his.

In William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest: Selected Works, the photographer’s charge to himself seems to be, “Make a picture of nothing at all,” the emptiness takes on a special character. Seizing on the blankness as the very thing to see, he joins the poet Wallace Stevens in voyaging through the God-less realms where it is left to the hapless twentieth-century self, embarked on its own idiotic quest, to discern the difference between the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

In much of the astonished comment about the outcome, Trump’s victory has become inflated beyond what it actually is. Despite low turnout, the popular vote was narrowly won by Clinton, and it was Gary Johnson and Jill Stein who appear to have cost Clinton critical states in the Electoral College. It’s not a stretch to conclude that, absent the third-party candidates, Clinton would have won the election.

What is missing from post-election analyses is a recognition of the outsized influence the Internet has had in this election, influence that may be less susceptible to fixing than, say, tweaking polling methods or replacing political consultants. Out of four million election-related tweets created between September 16 and October 21, one in five were generated by bots. About 39 percent—4,645,254 of Donald Trump’s 11,972,303 Twitter followers—were bots, compared to 524,141 of Hillary Clinton’s 10,696,761, or just 5 percent.