National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro talks to strangers. And he’s made a living out of finding and broadcasting their stories to forge connections between even more strangers.
As part of Kansas City Public Library’s 150th anniversary speaker series, Shapiro speaks at the Central location on Thursday, June 13 (visit kclibrary.org/events for details and to RSVP) about his book, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening, and the important nuances of storytelling that he considers every day.
Shapiro has been one of the distinctive voices of All Things Considered since 2015. Before that, he served as NPR’s international correspondent based in London, White House correspondent during the Obama administration, and justice correspondent during the George W. Bush administration.
Before the event, Shapiro and I spoke by phone about how individuals influence the stories they tell and, in turn, the world around them.
AK: A huge part of this project is looking at the lasting marks you’ve made on journalism and culture. What did you discover about your “fingerprints” (your word) while writing this?
AS: I think of the book as a way of documenting both the way the stories that I’ve told have shaped me, and the way that the person I am has shaped the stories that I’ve told. I realized that in putting these stories down in a book, I’m able to extend the reach of so many of these people who’ve had such a big impact on me, the people who I write about in all of these chapters, who I call the “best strangers in the world.”
One small thread of that is my own evolution from thinking that journalism might not have a place for somebody like me, to realizing that journalism, like so many fields, is ever evolving. The people who gave me my start, the founding mothers of NPR, may have taken their first steps in journalism thinking there was nobody quite like them either. I’ve come to realize that uniqueness can be an advantage, not a hindrance.
AK: It seems like the flip side of what you’re saying is one of the other concerns in the book, the so-called “view from nowhere.”
The view from nowhere, as it’s generally described, is the idea that your life experience, and the person you are, has no bearing whatsoever on the stories that you tell as a journalist. It was always this kind of gold-standard aspirational idea that reporters should be able to set everything they know about the world aside and be able to report “just the facts.”
Getting the facts right and being thorough and nuanced and fair and expansive and accurate is all incredibly important. Also, the view from nowhere was never really from nowhere. It was from the perspective of the majority. Fish might not recognize the water they swim in, but I don’t believe that there is such a thing as an absence of identity.
I kept going back to the part of the book about Savanna Madamombe in Zimbabwe. I didn’t want her story to simply be an easy comparison to your own work, but are you in a way saying that anyone can do some version of what you do?
AS: I’m going to give you another story, and I think it’s relevant to the question you’re asking. There’s this whole chapter about fiction, and the story that comes to mind was an interview that I did with an author named Naomi Alderman. She wrote this novel called The Future, which is sort of an end-of-the-world novel. I asked her how every day she faces the problems confronting humanity, and she quoted a line from the Talmud, the Jewish sacred text, which says, “It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to refrain from it.”
Then Naomi said, “We don’t have to worry about some destination far in the future when all problems are solved. Just start today. Go outside your house and pick up a piece of trash. Some final state of perfection is not the point. If God or evolution or whatever put us here thought perfection was important, we wouldn’t have ended up so imperfect.”
I guess what I’m saying, to bring it back to your question and the story about Sava, is you don’t have to transform your community, the country, or the world. You can plant flowers in a public flower box, you can pick up trash, you can make any small gesture. And that is enough. I think that if Savanna Madamombe could do that in the context of the dictatorial regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, I can do that in whatever challenging situation I might someday find myself, and I presently find myself, in. So can literally everyone else.
We can all be the best whatever in the world.
Yeah, exactly. We have no right to give into pessimism, because if the people who I’ve met, with whatever limited power, influence, and voice they may have, are able to persist in optimism and attempting to change things for the better, then those of us with more power and more of a voice and more of a platform, have no right to throw up our hands and say it’s hopeless, everything is too hard, I give up.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
