Jon Stewart bemoans the monster he helped create

The New York Times published a wide-ranging interview with Jon Stewart on Monday. It was good reading for some of its insights considering recent petulant Twitter exchanges in and around politics.

Stewart expressed regret about giving in to impulse and satisfying the desire for conflict on his show. He acknowledged, “Those moments when you had a tendency, even subconsciously, to feel like, ‘We have to live up to the evisceration expectation.’ We tried not to give something more spice than it deserved, but you were aware of, say, what went viral. Resisting that gravitational force is really hard.”