Not every story needs to be a referendum on your worldview, either validating or refuting it.

living a mythic narrative

you’d have to turn to statistics

will be used to undermine larger, more important truths,

who insist that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged

The mainstream media prefers to focus on sensational mass shootings and police killings of unarmed black men.

Gun control proponents don’t want to hear stories about homeowners protecting their families with guns

Yet these days, telling the wrong true story can get you called traitor

A certain type of man would no doubt gleefully seize on this coda as evidence that women are fickle, self-dramatizing flibbertigibbets whose recall and accusations can’t be trusted

I didn’t include in the essay was that, a year or two later, she contacted me again to apologize, explaining that she’d been in a bad place in her life when she’d last written me, and assured me that I had been a good influence.

a risky subject, he noted, in our current sexual-political combat zone.

shouldn’t every story get to be told?

are these the stories the public most needs to hear

ome who reject any gender identification, and others who’ve second-guessed their transitions

stories as propaganda, as weapons

Women also face gender bias, sexual harassment and powerful structural barriers in the workplace.

her instructor might ask if she is truly taken with the subject or if she is looking to store up “insurance points,” as some girls call them.

begin study sessions by taking sample tests, to see how much they know before figuring out how much more they need to do to attain mastery over a concept or task.

“Right,” my daughter said. “Of course she could!”

inefficient overwork,

how do we get hyper-conscientious girls (and boys, as there certainly are some with the same style) to build both confidence and competence at school?

But she never felt “safe” enough to ever put in less than maximum effort.

Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in,

shortage of confidence.

also hold them back in the work force?

staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies.

girls are more disciplined about their schoolwork than boys

Nicknames have nothing to do with it. So let’s not have much to do with them.

It’s the fact that, according to polls, most voters in November 2016 deemed him dishonest and indecent, yet plenty of them cast their ballots for him anyway.

‘average American,’ and also to expand the definition of it.”

readers and viewers, no matter how much they complain about the media’s shallowness, reward it.

It was his “political skills.”

The media is not using their strength, their franchise, to elevate and illuminate the conversation. They’re just getting you all jazzed up about the game.”

Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments.

‘What’s your reaction to what Trump just said?,’ there’s no way to drive your own message.”

We need to do something else, too, which is to recognize that Trump now has an actual record in office and to discuss that with as much energy as we do his damned Twitter feed.

he appealed to voters who largely disregard the mainstream media and who thrilled to his exhortations that they disregard it further.

spotlight turned on Trump was a little bit less, because no one thought he would be the president, and that was a grave mistake.”

“The basic flaw of the press coverage, and I count myself in it, was the total assumption that Hillary would win,”

We interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories about each contender, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were from another’s.

he commanded much more coverage than any other candidate from either party

while our coverage of him had turned overwhelmingly negative by the final months of the 2016 campaign, it by no means started out that way.

He doesn’t hate the media, not at all. He uses us.

He’s indisputably spectacular.

Democracies don’t just get the leaders they deserve. They get the leaders who make it through whatever obstacle course — and thrive in whatever atmosphere — their media has created.

to redeem ourselves.

now and November 2020, especially in the context of what may well be the most emotional and intense presidential race of our lifetimes

his talent for using us as vessels for propaganda.

We had to weigh a request in line with precedent against a president out of line when it comes to truth.

repeat the mistakes that we made in 2016 and continued to make during the first stages of his presidency

Or will we note Trump’s latest nonsense only briefly and pivot to matters more consequential?

There’s no doubt.

We do it by taking the stage and by telling our own stories, which is really, in the end, our way of saying “I love you” to our parents, our families, our communities and our country.

white Americans are more afraid of invasions by Muslims, Mexicans and Central Americans.

No amount of Asian-American success will change this dynamic of white people fearing that we are the Asian invasion — taking their jobs, breaking the curve, stealing their seats in the Ivy League — until we challenge racism of both the explicit and implicit kinds.

You cannot be proud of your artist and storyteller children only when they win Golden Globes.

We learned to be ashamed of our parents

We were collectively the villains, the servants, the enemies, the mistresses, the houseboys, the invaders.

More advocates telling our stories in our way with our faces, our inflections, our concerns, our intuitions.

America had invaded us

We knew that somehow we were seen by other Americans as invaders of their country, even if it happened to be our country, too.

lucky that I had never been called a racist slur to my face,

We laughed about that term, but looking back, it was clear that we had absorbed and internalized the racism of American society.

My neighbors were older white working-class people, Mexican immigrants and Vietnamese refugees.

I have met so few who have proudly told me that their children are English majors or have become writers or artists.

“model minority.”

They have encouraged, or forced, many of us to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, and to feel ashamed if we do not.

which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for how we should live our lives.

This struggle and sacrifice was how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it.

the silent sacrifice of the parents, the difficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the garbled expression of love.

project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immigrant and refugee life

perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans was when she thanked her parents.

the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother.

Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?

It is of course true that there are huge challenges ahead. The gains against global poverty and disease seem to be slowing, and climate change is an enormous threat to poor nations in particular.

I suspect that this misperception reflects in part how we in journalism cover news. We cover wars, massacres and famines but are less focused on progress.

For example, nine out of 10 Americans say in polls that global poverty is worsening or staying the same, when in fact the most important trend in the world is arguably a huge reduction in poverty.

most Americans (and citizens of other countries, too) are spectacularly misinformed.

The big news that won’t make a headline and won’t appear on television is that 15,000 children died around the world in the last 24 hours. But in the 1990s, it was 30,000 kids dying each day.

On a dirt road in rural Angola a few years ago, I met a woman named Delfina Fernandes

Let’s hit pause on our fears and frustrations and share a nanosecond of celebration at this backdrop of progress.

Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time, according to Max Roser of Oxford University and his Our World in Data website. Every day, another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time. And each day an additional 620,000 people were able to get online for the first time.

o here’s my antidote to that gloom: Let me try to make the case that 2018 was actually the best year in human history.

Will the economy collapse first, the ice sheets melt first, or chaos and war envelop us first?

The world is, as everyone knows, going to hell, but there’s still the nervous thrill of waiting to see precisely which dark force will take us down.