One of the many topics that Pew Research releases polls about is the subject of political party identification (or “party ID”). Every even-numbered year before a national election, you can count on them surveying on that. Party ID is a little different than just counting up the number of people registered with each party in each state, which is also an important measure if you’re looking at a specific state. But “party ID” is more helpful than that. For one thing, a number of states don’t even have registration by party, so you can never pin down a truly national number.

According to Nielsen, adults spent an average of 72.5 billion minutes per week consuming news in 2016 — that's billion, with a "b."

All credit here to Pew Research Center on its assessment of 16 interesting trends in 2016. Here’s three that seemed particularly worth mulling, but there’s more where this came from.

"The humanity has been reduced to nothingness and all that’s left in its place is an argument that can never really be won." Musician, brony advocate and Village Voice advice columnist Andrew W.K. sent a powerful message to a self-proclaimed “liberal democrat with very progressive values” bashing his right-wing father that has been resonating throughout the Twitterverse.