I know: This edition of Your Weekend Reader has been posted much later than usual. It’s not a function of post-election angst; it’s more that a series of personal matters (none apparently too serious yet) ended up sucking away much of my Friday and Saturday, the days when I typically when I write the Reader. I was feeling really bad about the lateness of this week’s edition until my spouse pointed out that I do this as a hobby.

I still feel kind of bad, though.

So, yes, the election. Let me point you to a handful of some of the more provocative pieces I saw in the week of Tuesday’s stunner. Content warning: You won’t agree with all of these, but that’s kind of the entire point of the Weekend Reader.

First up, Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, who says the stories of real people in his hometown of Yamhill help explain why working-class Americans are fleeing the Democratic Party.

Ben Rhodes, writing in the Times, argues that Democrats walked into the trap of defending the institutions — the “establishment,” if you will — that many Americans distrust.

We can’t continue to delude ourselves that Donald Trump is some kind of outlier, argues Carlos Lozada, also in the Times; “Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad,” he writes. “After all, what is more normal than a thing that keeps happening?”

Oren Cass, the head economist at a conservative think tank, reflects on the inevitable messes that result whenever presidents mistake their personal policy preferences for what the people really want: “Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.” Many of Cass’s recommendations here could remind you of that talk circling nowadays on how the the “best possible Trump administration” might come to pass — but it also might strike you as the unmistakable sound of someone whistling past the graveyard.

Over at The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel wonders if the new message to right-wing influencers on social media — “you are the media now” — is yet another blow against legacy media such as newspapers that, you know, still try to publish those slippery things called “facts.” Warzel isn’t optimistic.

Also from The Atlantic, here’s Megan Garber on how Trump has become the 21st century’s greatest showman. Writes Garber:

Trump is a showman above all, which has proved to be a major source of his omnipresence. He is image all the way down. He is also narrative shed of its connection to grounded truth. He has endeared himself to many Americans by denigrating the allegedly unchecked power of “the media”; the irony is that he is the media.

And The Atlantic’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Jennifer Senior has a piece that I actually would describe as lovely and hopeful: It’s about the need to move forward as a nation without looking at strangers as potential enemies. If you click on just one link in this weekend’s Reader, let me suggest that this should be the one.

Tuesday night offered interesting local elections as well. The Corvallis City Council elections showed, again, the value of incumbency: As of the weekend, it appears that all five incumbents running for fresh two-year terms on the council won, although Ward 9’s Tony Cadena must still be sweating over his close call against challenger Karen-Jean Canan. Winning incumbents included Ward 5’s Charlyn Ellis, whose victory in an unopposed race casts additional doubt on efforts to remove her from the council, efforts that increasingly seem like such a good investment of the city’s time and taxpayer dollars, if you get my drift.

Two of the six candidates from the so-called “Sunrise Corvallis” slate won their races — Ava Olson in Ward 4 and Alison Bowden in Ward 6. The best news, in my view, was the election in Ward 3 of Jim Moorefield, a former councilor and leader of what was then called Willamette Neighborhood Housing Services; he should be a real asset on the council. The open question is whether this council will be more effective than the council now playing out its two-year term — although I would encourage the new council to set its sights somewhat higher than that.

You might recall a Weekend Reader post from a couple of weeks ago in which I said, in essence, that having a billionaire own a newspaper could be good in some cases — and not so good in others. A reader called me on that and, in retrospect, I think he was right — especially after watching Jeff Bezos in action at The Washington Post over the last couple of weeks. Here’s a piece from 404 Media that I think that reader will enjoy.

I suppose there may be cases when a billionaire owner might be preferable to having a hedge fund like Alden Global Capital own the show. But after watching publicly owned companies like Lee Enterprises continue to cut their newsrooms after fending off that hostile takeover bid from Alden Global, it’s no wonder that a number of Lee journalists are finding it increasingly hard to tell the difference between Lee ownership and Alden Global.

In a story that perhaps is related to all of this: The Associated Press reports that winter depression is a real thing. But there are ways to counter it.

It feels as if you might need something to cheer you up. So how about this story from The Oregonian/OregonLive? It’s about a Happy Valley man who recently set a Guinness world record by paddling a giant pumpkin more than 45 miles down the Columbia River in October.

That’s it for this weekend. I promise next week’s edition will be ready by Saturday afternoon.