At least lately, it's become pretty obvious that WaPo and NYT are feeding us crap on a regular basis. If you go look at the source materials, you'll realize that their "neutral" summaries aren't close to neutral, or aren't factual at all. Many times you don't even have to go to the source--the articles/headlines themselves aren't even internally consistent. ("Two men say they're Jesus, one of them must be wrong...")
Maybe it was always this way, and I never noticed.
Personally, I cannot be productive in a noisy environment (sans headphones), and I most definitely cannot be productive pair programming. (Or, good god, mob programming.) Yes, I've tried it.
I've been on one or two interviews where this requirement was brought up. For the common good, I just excuse myself.
It seems possible that some people can actually produce good results via pair programming, but I'm not aware of any examples myself.
Try getting rejected at the final executive approval (i.e., their magic eight-ball) after passing the in-person day and the hiring committee.
Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success.
If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the world managed to produce Google+.
tldr: The half of the country that voted for the current President are all awful, stupid people, and they spend their time reading awful, stupid websites.
What happened to NIPS? Last I heard they had decided against a name change, since that was the sentiment of the survey, and even women seemed indifferent.
This sounds good--who could object to silencing white supremacists? But recent history suggests that this will morph in very short order into simply suppressing unpopular ideas, science even.
The telephone seems like a better model. Yes, people can do bad things with it, and law enforcement has significant resources for policing it. But we don't just turn off people's phones because we don't like them.
Ideas: Get some good headphones and listen to trance/edm/whatever music to get yourself in the zone. Get distractions like phones away from your desk and use a web blocker to zap crap sites like this one. Adrafanil or nicotine gum, maybe.