Lydia Polgreen

Tweet from Daniel Pipes: "The uprising in Iran in early January suggested an even greater insurgency would then follow on the U.S.-Israeli campaign to erode regime power. Yet, the populace now appears cowed into near-silence. This ranks as the most surprising and disappointing development of the past week. Without a new uprising, the regime will likely remain in power, less powerful but more awful than ever. (The picture below is from Jan. 10 in Tehran.)"

Amazing how quickly "We're fighting this war for freedom of the Iranian people" becomes "The Iranian people are at fault for not rising up."

whoa what the fuck is that Minneapolis line??? that's psychotic.

My latest on the cover of Sunday @nytopinion.nytimes.com: the fantasy and terrifying reality of Trump’s reckless war in Iran. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...

Fuzzy memories and hard facts: An SC accuser's claims against Epstein, Trump examined An alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein gave FBI agents true accounts of her time growing up in SC. Claims she made about Donald Trump remain unsubstantiated.

Breaking: SC newspaper verifies portions of Trump accuser's story. Textbook journalism. Local journalism. Support your local news outlets. www.postandcourier.com/news/epstein...

A water desalination plant is presumptively a civilian object & it is an object indispensable to survival.

Targeting a civilian object is a war crime.

Targeting an object indispensable to survival can implicate the starvation war crime.

NB: carnegieendowment.org/emissary/202...

Investors are not ready for a true shock The consensus view of the impact of the Iran war on equities and bonds may well prove too sanguine

Investors are not ready for a true shock ft.trib.al/tWMyNkv | opinion

Opinion | Trump’s Fantasy Is Crashing Down

I wrote about Trump's fantasy of omnipotence and invulnerability crashing against the material reality of a interdependent world. This insane, heedless war will ruin us all. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...

There's nothing wrong with polling these questions, I guess, but I do wonder how much it really matters. Americans think a lot of things! For example, large majorities favor restrictions on guns and yet the GOP holds a governing trifecta.

1000 percent agree. I would put it this way: Gender affirming surgery is surprisingly common for teenagers, including procedures to alter the chest, nose, and other facial features. These procedures are performed extremely rarely on transgender youth.

Opinion | Born This Way? Born Which Way? (Published 2023)

Anyway, I wrote about all of this a couple years ago. It is hard to believe things are so much worse now. www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/o...

It can also be true that a minuscule number of trans adolescents are among the hundreds of thousands of minors who get gender affirming cosmetic surgery in America, and a lot of people feel weird about that.

Multiple things can be true. Many people are uncomfortable with transgender visibility in America, worry about edge cases like sports and medical care for adolescents and some (mostly men it seems?) worry about bathrooms. And voters can still trust Democrats more on trans issues.

very much agree.

Totally agree though this was at least presented as what it was. I’m the last person who would defend this piece, believe me!

Roald Dahl's Letter About Losing his Daughter in 1962 " there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. "

Anyway here's a good nonfiction piece about the horror of measles fs.blog/roald-dahl-l...

I don’t remember the details of that piece and I am not a fan of his work on this subject to say the least, but this one seems even more problematic because it was entirely hypothetical, not a composite or distortion.

I am an opinion columnist and I spent most of my career as a reporter. Most of my colleagues have either deep reporting experience or deep expertise in a specific subject matter (or both!) and we are rigorously fact checked.

The point is that making the most extreme possible outcome via fiction is just dishonest regardless how one feels about the underlying issue.

A thought experiment: what if the Atlantic had done this with another extremely rare phenomenon: a trans youth who regretted medical transition. Instead of finding an actual person this happened to, they interviewed doctors and invented a narrative with the most horrific possible outcome.

The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig on her “hypothetical,” heavily reported measles essay "We were attracted to the idea of providing a play-by-play of the progression of measles in granular detail."

I was really troubled by this Atlantic piece. It was presented as reporting, but it seems more accurate to describe it as speculative fiction based on reporting. It seems like a bizarre choice for a journalistic institution to make. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-...

for sure and I’d love to see a breakdown by race. Of course people of color have their own reasons to be mistrustful of the news media! my overall point is that trust may be the wrong thing to measure.

That time period coincides with the rise of the internet and social media, which feels important! Correlation not causation of course but seems like a big factor.

Newspapers got more aggressive and better, and aspects of coverage seemed disagreeable but the geographic monopoly and other valuable information they provided (weather, stocks, sports, movie times) made them useful anyway. Until they didn’t!

Yes reporting the facts of civil rights is exactly what the audience didn’t like though! I thought that seemed obvious? And circulation doesn’t mean trust. My whole point is that trust might not be a helpful measure and correlate with financial success.

Great piece. I had the same misplaced optimism about Bezos, with the accompanying lament that media has so come to rely on the munificence and whims of billionaires.

On trust in media, I commend this essay that Lydia cites by Michael Schudson, esp this passage direct.mit.edu/daed/article...

I didn’t end up including it, but one thing very much on my mind when I wrote it was the incredible scene in the Mad Men series premiere where Don Draper comes up with the “It’s Toasted” tagline for Lucky Strike. People just want to be told that whatever they are doing, they are ok.

This NYT column by @polgreen.bsky.social is the truest thing I've ever seen about the REAL reason public trust in the media collapsed

Opinion | Why Did I Trust Jeff Bezos?

There is so much fretting about trust in news these days. Maybe there shouldn’t be. My latest, on how Bezos won my misplaced trust the same way the media often did: by telling me what I wanted to hear. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/o...

Both Democrats and Republicans helped create the infrastructure for ideological surveillance at the US border—but the Trump administration is deploying it in the service of a radically partisan and censorial agenda. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...