The-Best-Strangers-In-The-World - by Ari Shapiro
Published:
The-Best-Strangers-In-The-World - by Ari Shapiro
Read: 2024-08-30
Recommend: 6/10
I appreciate his honesty and bravery in coming out early in his life, especially considering he has supportive friends and family. I admire the way he treats hate mail as a badge of honor. It’s no surprise he became a great journalist; he prefers talking to people (a subject-subject relationship) rather than talking about them (a subject-object relationship).
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Once I realized that I would have to come out to my parents and friends someday, I concluded that I would gain nothing by postponing the inevitable. “The sooner I do this, the sooner it will be over with,” I told myself. And so I ripped off the Band-Aid and asked my parents if I could talk to them about something. Their reaction was more open-minded than many coming-out stories I’ve heard from the 1990s. “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m sure.” “Well, we still love you.” They asked if I wanted to see a therapist, I declined, and they decided that they would go see one themselves.
I guess today my fashion choices would be labeled “gender nonconforming,” but that wasn’t a term we knew. Nobody around me identified as queer; calling yourself gay seemed radical enough. People routinely shouted faggot! from car windows as they drove past us on the street, and we reflexively replied with breeder! and a middle finger in the air.
I can see now that, as the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, I keep seeking out ways to help people listen to one another. As algorithms pull us into feedback loops and congratulate us for dunking on perceived opponents
I’ve always considered hate mail to be a badge of honor.
As the photograph in the Oval Office later that day would capture, I felt a bit like Cinderella’s stepsister, trying to force an ill-fitting shoe onto my misshapen foot.
When I started reporting my own stories for NPR and getting my own hate mail, it felt like a sign that I had finally arrived. I savored it. I started to keep a file folder of the ones that came on actual paper. And after the arrival of Twitter, I created a photo album on my phone for screen grabs of hate tweets. (I have another photo album for genuinely kind fan mail, for days when I need a pick-me-up.)
“Only time will tell” is an inside joke—a way of saying, “I don’t have a good way to wrap up this story, so I’ll slap on an only time will tell and call it a day.”
I could see that Russia wasn’t creating a revolution from scratch. Unlike the full-scale assault of 2022, the operation in 2014 was part invasion, part civil war. Moscow was tapping into something real, exacerbating preexisting tensions, and inflaming divisions that were already bubbling under the surface. When Russia later tried to run a similar playbook in the 2016 US elections, I felt a deep sense of déjà vu. The Facebook ads that Russian interests paid for in 2016, in many cases, were not about an American political candidate. They were about gun rights, LGBTQ equality, or racial justice. And in the US, the Russians played both sides of these debates.
Washington, DC, is a transient city; people move away, and I wind up spending a little bit of time with a lot of different people.
My point is not that objectivity is an unworthy goal, or that every journalist has an axe to grind. It’s that there’s no such thing as an absence of identity. We are all shaped by the lives we’ve lived. We all have a stake in our government, in our economy, in the quality of our air and water, and in the shape of our society. When journalists pretend otherwise, it just entrenches existing power structures. The “view from nowhere” that earlier generations of journalists aspired to was never actually from nowhere. It was from a straight, white, Christian, male perspective—not coincidentally, the perspective of people whose power is built into existing systems. Sometimes fish don’t recognize the water they’re swimming in, but I don’t think the status quo is ever neutral.
In 2019, I caught up with him on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He told me, “I hope that in the future, all walls fall down.”
Every time I put another installment of Monzer’s story on the air, listeners asked how they could help. And I felt conflicted about it. I was glad that his story moved them. But there were millions of displaced Syrians in need. Should Monzer, or Mohammed, have gotten cash from a concerned NPR listener just because I happened to tell their stories and not others? And if they shouldn’t have, then why exactly was I asking these guys to narrate their most traumatic experiences for the world to witness? Was this just vampirism, where people poured their pain into my microphone, and I walked away with a paycheck?
The one that really made me feel like I was on the path to figuring out what it meant to be the first Ari Shapiro, and not just the next Nina Totenberg. The postcard has a picture of tulips, and the stamps are doves of peace. It reads (punctuation and capitalization as written): Dear Ari, Please Butch up. I find a daily dose of your personality, annoying. I’m a person too. D. Emerson, Miami, Fl I framed it when it arrived, and it has sat in a place of pride on my desk ever since, as I have steadfastly refused to butch up year after year. I don’t know who D. Emerson is. I don’t know their gender, though one can assume. I’m sure he had no idea that his postcard would have such staying power. He included no return address, so I’ve never been able to contact him. If I could, I would simply tell Mr. Emerson, “Thank you for listening.”
I have forgotten song lyrics in the middle of a concert more than once. I quote the performer Taylor Mac to myself: “Perfection is for assholes.” If audiences wanted something flawless, they’d listen to the album.
I told him. “You may get bullied for having a gay brother, which isn’t fair. So, I’m sorry for making your freshman year more difficult. I know you didn’t ask for this.” I will never forget his reply. “You don’t deserve it either,” he said. “You didn’t ask to be gay. And you shouldn’t be bullied for it any more than I should for being your brother.” He was thirteen years old.
As lucky as I was to have a supportive family and friends, I got the message growing up that gay stories don’t have happy endings. Maybe you would die young—of AIDS, a gay bashing, a drug overdose, or suicide. You might get fired from your job, or marry a woman to get by, potentially ruining someone else’s life while trying to salvage yours. Those were the only stories I saw on TV and in movies, and I didn’t personally know any queer people with happier stories to prove them wrong.
In my reporting, and in my news consumption, I’d rather talk to people than about people—focus on the folks affected by legislation rather than the ones writing it. Entire media empires have been built on the opposite approach—analyzing who’s up or down and speculating on how the war in Syria or Yemen will determine which party controls Congress.
He wasn’t even being homophobic, exactly. In a twisted way, it looked like he was trying to find solidarity with me against what he perceived as our shared enemy. “America is a place that’ll even tolerate people like you,” he seemed to be implying. “Why would you want to jeopardize that?”
“We take ourselves very seriously, except when we decide not to. Then we take not taking ourselves very seriously very seriously.”
He discovered that his same-sex attractions helped him to understand what it meant to be different and to connect to fights against injustice. Although he could conceal his difference in a way that allowed him to pass, “I knew what it was like to be a despised minority,” he said.
At Ivan’s sentencing, Hector stood up to read a statement. “I don’t know if I’ve forgiven you, Ivan Simpson,” he read off the page. “But I don’t hate you. I hate with all my soul what you did to my daughter.” And then Hector worked up the nerve to turn around and face Ivan, to say the last thing he’d written. “I wish for all of us who’ve been so wounded by this crime, I wish that we might find God’s peace. And I wish that also for you, Ivan Simpson.”
“He fought with love until his dying breath.”
In our 2018 interview, I asked Jemisin why she wanted to begin her story with the end of the world. And she told me, “In a lot of cases, what’s considered an apocalypse for some people is what other people have been living every day.” Apocalypse was subjective, she explained. For her main character, “The world ended when this woman’s son was killed,” she said. “This is nothing new.” She wanted to explore when we consider a cataclysm to have begun and ended.
Each morning, someone’s mother calls and sings happy birthday to him. Which makes perfect sense, in a sort of dream logic. If you have more money than you can possibly spend and you’re still unhappy, why wouldn’t you buy up all the birthdays? “I think that the moment that you write things that are more metaphorical and not a statement about reality itself, people let some of their defenses down,” Keret told me. “And maybe, if I’m lucky, then they get disoriented enough that they can rethink something.” Not to mention, the reading experience is far more entertaining than a screed about income inequality.
as Randall said, “Dipping into art can be an act of self-care. It can be a cure. And if it’s not a cure, it can be a relief that allows you to rest, to go back out to fight again.”
Reporting the news on the radio scratched more of my performance-related itches than I would have expected. I got to use my voice, tell a story, connect with an audience, and on the best days maybe even change someone’s view of the world. The news was dynamic and fast-paced enough that I didn’t miss being onstage. I definitely didn’t miss auditions. I liked that my full-time job came with a 401(k) and health insurance, and that I didn’t have to go back to square one after every closing night. Not to mention, as a reporter I got to write the script and choose the stories I would tell. I didn’t have to settle for reading whatever a director handed to me.
Deadlines can clarify the mind.
When I asked him how he balances his various projects, Daniel told me about a German expression that I have never been able to confirm with any actual German person: “You have one leg to stand on, and one leg to dance on.” I related to this idea: one thing pays the bills; another feeds your soul.
The gay rights pioneer Harry Hay used to talk about “Subject-Subject relationships.” He argued that society raises straight people to think about relationships as Subject-Object. The pursuer and the pursued; the conqueror and the conquest. Journalism often feels that way. I arrive in a community and gather up stories from people who live there. Their voices become ingredients in a recipe that I mix, bake, and serve to an audience of strangers. Then I drift off like some Mary Poppins who hasn’t actually improved anybody’s life before floating away on her parasol. Hay believed that one reason gay people exist is to demonstrate a different way of relating to one another. Not in service of a selfish goal, but in mutuality and recognition of one another as more than a means to an end. Not Subject-Object, but Subject-Subject.
First of all, I refuse to rank my conversation with Bette Midler above or below my interview with Patti LuPone. That is a Sophie’s Choice if I’ve ever seen one, and I’m not going anywhere near it. And second of all, the premise of the question always seems like a setup for failure. If I spend my career thinking wistfully back on the one great interview that I did way back when, something in the system has broken down. I should be excited about an interview I did last week, and one that I’m doing next week. Hosting a daily news program is like sprinting on a treadmill at the gym. If you pause to gaze at the hot guy walking by, you’ll fall on the floor. My point is, when you try to Consider All Things, picking your favorite thing to consider kinda misses the spirit of the project. I’m not here to compare apples and oranges; I’m here to make a delicious fruit salad. So when I get asked about my favorites, here’s what I do. I smile, say “great question,” and pivot. “Let me tell you about an interview I did just last week that I loved.” Pro tip: if someone asks you a question you don’t feel like answering, whether at a dinner party or in an NPR interview, begin by thanking them for the excellent question. Then pretend they asked something else and confidently answer the imagined one without missing a beat. Do it with enough conviction, and nobody will care.