Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

Finding Your Inner Journalist


buy disulfiram tablets uk You already have a journalist in you.

You were born asking questions. Every kid is. Why is the sky blue? Why does the dog tilt its head? Why does Dad mutter at the newspaper? Curiosity is the first skill of a reporter.

Somewhere along the way, we stop using it. We accept what we’re told. We scroll headlines instead of asking what’s behind them. That’s when the muscle weakens. Journalism is the act of flexing it again.

I grew up with ink on the kitchen table. Dad carried a notepad in his left back pocket and a story in his eyes. He believed the simplest question in the world could be the hardest to ask: Why?

I watched him listen more than he talked, though he never shied from the word. I learned early that information is power, and that power ought to be shared.

Forty years later, I still believe journalism is the highest form of citizenship. It is not just the job of a newsroom. It belongs to anyone who gives a damn about what’s true.

A journalist pays attention. A journalist wants to know how things work, who benefits, and who pays the bill. You don’t need a byline to do that. You only need to care enough to look.

And in this Trumpian era of wild claims and louder microphones, that instinct has never mattered more. Every day, falsehoods parade as fact. Platforms reward outrage more than accuracy. It takes a working journalist’s mind to cut through the fog.

The country doesn’t need more pundits. It needs more reporters, even unpaid ones. You can be one every time you ask, Is that true?

You can find your inner journalist every day. Start by noticing. Notice who speaks for the group and who doesn’t get to. Notice which streets get fixed first. Notice the way a neighbor’s tone changes when politics comes up. Notice how every commercial is a little lie wearing good lighting.

Observation is reporting. The rest is craft.

Then ask. The question is the journalist’s instrument. Not the argument, not the opinion. The question.

What happened? Who decided that? When did this start? How do you know? Those five words—what, who, when, how, why—can peel the varnish off anything. They can turn gossip into fact. They can turn noise into signal.

The best journalists I know have curiosity wired to empathy. They don’t see sources or sides. They see people. They ask, then listen, and then ask again.

The secret is silence. Let someone talk long enough, and they will tell you the truth without realizing it.

The inner journalist does not hunt scandal. It hunts understanding. It searches for the small stories that explain the large ones.

A stoplight that never works says more about a city than a mayor’s press conference. A single parent trying to pay rent says more about an economy than a stock chart. Journalism is the art of connecting dots that people pretend are separate.

Technology has made everyone a potential reporter. We have cameras in our hands and archives in our pockets.

But the tools are only as good as the questions we ask. A smartphone can record, but it can’t discern. The journalist’s eye is still human. It knows tone, motive, timing, silence. It knows what’s missing.

Good reporting begins with questions. Each question, a step toward clarity. Each answer is provisional. Curiosity is a discipline.

So go find your inner journalist. Ask the next question. Then one more.

The truth is still out there. It’s just waiting for someone curious enough to care.

The Theater of Nobel


Trump wants the Nobel. Of course he does.

Donald Trump has spent a lifetime hunting trophies: the tower, the plane, the presidency, the truth itself.

Now he wants the Nobel Prize. Not the peace, not the literature, not the economics; the Nobel. The word itself is the jewel. He wants to see it next to his name on the chyron and the plaque and the history books that, in his mind, can still be rewritten.

He’s been saying as much this fall, pushing himself as the “peace president,” dialing Norwegian ministers out of the blue to ask about his odds, reminding anyone within microphone range that he’s kept America out of “seven wars.”

That’s generous math, but arithmetic has never slowed him down. For him, the Nobel is less about peace than validation, another prize in the collection like Mar-a-Lago, like the White House, like the 24-hour news cycle.

There’s a certain dark poetry to it. The same man who called NATO obsolete now wants the crown bestowed by one of its smallest members. The man who mocked Greta Thunberg for her anger now covets the medal she probably deserves.

And the committee, stiff-collared Norwegians in sensible shoes, will soon have to decide whether to indulge a man who doesn’t so much pursue peace as perform it.

Trump’s pitch isn’t new. He’s been nominating himself in one way or another since the Abraham Accords, the deal he still calls the greatest peace breakthrough in modern history.

It was a competent bit of diplomacy, though it was also about as much “peace” as signing a property lease. What made it pure Trump was the marketing. You didn’t need to read the text. You needed to see the pens, the handshakes, the cameras. The production was the policy.

The same instinct is at work now. When Trump talks about the Nobel, he’s not talking to Norway. He’s talking to the mirror. He’s building another headline, another way to tell the story of Trump the statesman, the dealmaker who solved Gaza, soothed Ukraine, and tamed Iran — whether or not any of those sentences hold up under daylight.

What matters is the pose. The look of peace. The photo of a man who once threatened to nuke hurricanes now asking for the dove.

You can almost feel the glee in the campaign rooms. Every mention of the Nobel stokes his base because it outrages everyone else. The left calls it absurd, the press calls it delusional, and Trump calls that proof he deserves it.

In the gospel of grievance, every insult is confirmation. If the Norwegians ignore him, it’s rigged. If they nod politely, it’s coming. And if, by some twist of diplomacy or lunacy, they give it to him, he’ll hold it aloft and call it divine.

He could, at moments, have actually earned it. He did steer the Koreas toward talk. He did keep major powers out of new wars for a time.

But true peace isn’t the absence of bombs; it’s the presence of empathy, a language he’s never spoken. The Nobel honors the pause before the applause. Trump doesn’t pause.

So he’ll keep reaching, keep calling, keep naming the prize that will never quite name him. Because for Trump, peace was never the point. Immortality was.