I didn’t like my friend’s intervention. He was right

I became a reporter because I wanted to understand people different from me. Then I gave in to a culture that tells us to reduce others. One day, my friend called me out

Sometimes a friend sees you more clearly than you see yourself. Sometimes that means more clearly than you wish to be seen.

That’s how it was with my friend Sam. We had come up as journalists together, had met while we were foreign correspondents in India, had built parallel New York lives together, raising kids, writing, trying to make sense of the age.

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