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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our spring membership drive trying to reach our goal of a thousand donations by seven o'clock. During this drive on this show, we're featuring new books. That's going to be a series for this whole seven Days of Brian Lehrer show in this drive. Books that we have on the Brian Lehrer show bookshelf, some really interesting titles are out recently, and we decided we would feature some of them. Some are more political, some are more personal, some are by famous people, some by authors who are less well known, but who we think you'll enjoy listening to or learning from, or interacting with.

We're planning to have at least one author on the show each day of the drive, sometimes two, and we'll kick it off right now with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has now been with the Times for 40 years and who has just published a memoir about a lot of that called Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life, and you know we could use some hope in these pessimistic times. Interesting that it comes from Kristof who has devoted his career as you regular readers would note to exposing some of the worst suffering in the world. That's what he's done, but maybe you saw his recent Times op-ed, his column that draws on the book called The Case for Hope.

We'll talk about that. He also has a book-related New York event tonight that brought him in physically from Oregon. It's Nicholas Kristof in conversation with the author Tara Westover at the Stryker Cultural Center of Temple Emanu-El at 65th and 5th in Manhattan. Tonight at 6:30, check the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center website for tickets. They're selling ticket plus book combos. I see. We'll also have a link on our site. Nick, congratulations on the book, and welcome back to WNYC.

Nicholas Kristof: Thank you. Great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: I see that even when you were a kid in Yamhill, Oregon, what a name, Yamhill, you thought of growing up to be a foreign correspondent. How'd you get that bug early on? Was it from your parents or some other way?

Nicholas Kristof: My dad was a World War II refugee and so in a very mixed-up household, he would speak to his brother in Polish and to his sister in Romanian. I think I had that sense of the world. When you're in Yamhill, Oregon, you feel like you're practically overseas already. You really do feel distant from the center. I wanted to shine a light a little bit on things that were distant from the center.

Brian Lehrer: It looks like your career as a crusading opinion columnist began very young when you wrote to oppose a dress code for girls at school. How old were you then?

Nicholas Kristof: I must have been 13. My journalism career began when the kids at Yamhill Grade School wanted to have a school newspaper and they held an organizational meeting and they all wanted to write for it, but nobody wanted to edit it, so they chose me as editor in absentia. That was the beginning of my career. I loved it.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, do they grow sweet potatoes in Yamhill?

Nicholas Kristof: No. It's actually a corruption of the name of the Indian tribe that lived in the area, the Yamhelas Indian and so it became Yamhill, but no yams to be found. There are hills but no yams.

Brian Lehrer: Jumping way ahead, you get to the Times in 1984, you're in your mid-twenties and you say what, send me to the poorest or most atrocity-laden countries in the world?

Nicholas Kristof: Yes. Pretty much the Times hired me, I think in part because at that point I spoke Arabic and French and was eager to be a foreign correspondent in remote places. They thought they might send me to West Africa or to Cairo. Then the way bureaucracies are, they ended up forgetting about my Arabic and French and sending me off to Hong Kong and then to China. That was perfect because my girlfriend then my wife was a Chinese-American and deeply interested in Asia.

Brian Lehrer: Then eventually your co-author, Sheryl WuDunn. I want to know--

Nicholas Kristof: This book is a challenge because all my previous books I've done with Sheryl.

Brian Lehrer: That's right.

Nicholas Kristof: This memoir is a test. Can I actually write a book by myself?

Brian Lehrer: The two of you have been on together. In fact, you've been on with us many times over the years. I was looking back at some of those appearances this morning since this is a memoir about your whole career. One time was in 2006 with a student named Casey Parks, who had just won a contest to travel with you to Africa. You were on in 2009 with Sheryl on your book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

You were on in 2011 to discuss the Occupy Wall Street movement and in 2018 to discuss the persecution of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Those are just some of the times. Can I ask, how do you cope emotionally with immersing yourself in humanity's hardest hardships for so much of your life?

Nicholas Kristof: One thing that I think I figured out actually really only in writing the book, I think I self-diagnosed myself maybe with a very mild case of PTSD, which suggests I don't entirely handle it, but I also realize that I come back from the field and I love to go hiking in the mountains and I drag my kids or my wife off backpacking. I think that's a wilderness therapy. That's, I think, part of the answer. The other is that I really do try to hold onto that hope and to see this backdrop of progress, which I think is very real, which we in journalism tend not to focus on. We focus on planes that crash, not planes that land. If I think about it, I really have seen immense progress and I try to hold onto that thought. I think that helps too.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to that hope and have you elaborate on the immense progress that you feel like you've seen during your life as we go. I also want to say that the ultimate success of a journalist, I think, is when you not just report some hard truths, but make a difference to improving those conditions. I didn't realize until now that you're reporting about childhood diseases in poor countries helps inspire the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to devote a lot of money to that. I see that they display your article about that topic at their headquarters. Can you briefly describe that reporting that you did, just as an example for our listeners, and how its relationship to the Gates Foundation philanthropy developed?

Nicholas Kristof: Sure. I was then based in Tokyo, but I'd always been interested in global poverty and health issues and I was a little bored by Tokyo because it was so peaceful and calm. I did a trip to South Asia and East Africa looking at malaria and diarrhea and other diseases and did a couple series about these common childhood ailments that just kill enormous numbers of people, including at that time diarrhea killing three million kids a year. The story came out and I don't think frankly, it made much of an impact except with two readers in Seattle who had a foundation and were trying to figure out how to donate effectively.

They had looked into providing computers to poor countries and that didn't seem so satisfying. Then they thought, well, maybe we can do something about these ailments like diarrhea that are killing so many people. They circulate it. Bill will send it to his dad who was helping with the foundation and they researched it. It's the most important article I've ever written because of these two readers in Seattle

Brian Lehrer: On the childhood, malnutrition linked diarrhea beat, Nick Kristof, whoever thought that would come to good, but it obviously has. Can you talk about the transition from reporter to columnist? Is the mission different?

Nicholas Kristof: I'm a little odd as the opinion columnist because I'm really a believer in reporting more than in opinions. I think that actually where--

Brian Lehrer: You don't sit in your living room and pound at your keyboard and say, this is what I think about the president, right?

Nicholas Kristof: I'm just skeptical of opinion reporting that is basically stirring the pot without adding to the pot. I think that when we as opinion mon viewers, when we just shout to the world and tell it what to do, I don't think that has very much effect. I think people who start out agreeing think that's brilliant. People who start out disagreeing aren't much swayed. At least in my case, I think that where my columns have had some impact, it's not so much by my arguments on the issue of the day. It's by helping project other issues onto the agenda that hadn't been there, making people spill their coffee in the morning essentially.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that brings us to your recent column. If you're just joining us, my guest is New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has a new book called Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life. It brings us to your recent related column called The Case for Hope. You start by acknowledging the despair and toxic divisions that are so widespread both in this country and around the world right now. We don't have to go over all of those. You're right that what you've learned from four decades of covering misery is hope. That's a quote. I'm going to read it again. That what you've learned from four decades of covering misery is hope. How does hope follow from witnessing a lot of misery?

Nicholas Kristof: In a couple of ways. One is that, side by side, with the worst of humanity, you invariably find the very best. We're not tested to the same degree in the US, but when you go to Eastern Congo or to South Sudan or to Myanmar, you encounter real evil. You see warlords who are truly just unbelievably brutal, but you also see that the response to that from a lot of ordinary people is just immense courage and decency and strength and resilience.

It's possible to come back from Eastern Congo and feel better about humanity, about our fellow humans. I think the other thing is that the specific things that I cover, genocide here or abuse of human rights there, while those are grim, there truly has been immense material and moral progress, I think, over the decades that I've been reporting. There's no doubt that we face enormous challenges at home and abroad, and we face threats to democracy here.

My hometown in rural Oregon has just been through hell in terms of lost jobs and people self-medicating with meth, but it is no doubt to me that things are better off now than they were when I began my career. This year is going to set a new record for the lowest share of children dying worldwide. There are a million fewer children who will die this year than in 2016. That matters if you're a parent, that your children are much more likely to survive. They're much more likely to get educated. A girl is much more likely to be able to go to school now than historically was the case.

Brian Lehrer: That's some of the material progress that dramatic decrease in extreme child poverty. We've covered it on the show in other segments. I know Barack Obama likes to talk about that, too. That's part of the material progress, but give me a thought on the moral progress. The assertion of moral progress in your lifetime might be a harder case to make because with authoritarianism on the rise and other fundamental moral challenges, that might seem so persistent. You're 65 now, where do you start?

Nicholas Kristof: It is true that there has been a real setback for democracy in the last half dozen years or so. China and Russia, I think, exemplified that, but if you think back over a somewhat larger period, the first country from which I was banned as a reporter was Poland in 1981, which, of course, at that point was a communist autocracy. I was banned, but obviously, then Poland became a democracy, and now I'm free to go. I covered democracy movements in Taiwan, in South Korea, and Indonesia, and Mongolia, in many places.

I do think over time that there has been a real improvement there. You look at even human rights and genocide. Terrible things happen, but we've also managed to see some real progress. If you look at AIDS, that was one of the things I spent a lot of time covering in the early 2000s. It really looked as if it was just going to rip sub-Saharan Africa apart. Then, partly because of PEPFAR in this country, the AIDS program, we were able to turn the corner, and it is no longer this fundamental threat.

I fully acknowledged all the threats that exist, and you add climate change to that, many others. I think Desmond Tutu was somebody I knew and admired, and he always said that despair is paralyzing, and that the way he was able to challenge Apartheid and to challenge homophobia and xenophobia in South Africa was to have this hope that animated him, that gave him a sense of possibility for the future.

Brian Lehrer: Nicholas Kristof's new book is called Chasing Hope: A Reporters Life. I'll mention the live event tonight, again, in conversation with Tara Westover at the Streicker Cultural Center of Temple Emanu-El at 65th and 5th in Manhattan tonight at 6:30. Check the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center website for tickets. They're selling ticket plus book combos. We'll also have a link on our side if that's the easiest way for you to get there.

Nick, thank you so much for sharing this with us. Thank you for all the times that you've come on the show over the years during your career up to this point. We try not to shrink from talking about the tough stuff, too. You're just so, so amazing at what you do.

Nicholas Kristof: Thank you. I appreciate that. Good luck in making the case for hope with your fund drive and achieving that in Anna Quindlen goal as well.

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