It took seeing one friend repeatedly reassure another that nothing was wrong and then, in their absence, proceed to describe everything that was, in fact, wrong for me to realize that I’m a very direct person. Obviously, I’ve told half-truths and stalled a confrontation for another day, but in a relatively deceit-free way—is it obvious I’ve been told that I’m a pretty terrible liar?
I was, however, unfamiliar with stating one thing and doing another, outside the realm of the cartoonishly evil and obviously untrustworthy. In real life, this wouldn’t happen. And so, while I happily discuss how the curtains “were not just blue” in seminars, I tend to believe that good-faith actors truthfully tell me what they’re doing.
One such good-faith actor in my life was The New York Times. I’m not sure when I first encountered it, but certainly by age 12, I was a regular visitor of the website. There was just nothing quite like typing in the ten letters of “nytimes.com” and seeing its reassuringly familiar crest at the top of the page, beneath which a list of sections boasted wide-ranging coverage, from U.S. public schools to foreign policy to public health issues.
Now I was able to browse and inform myself independently, instead of waiting for someone to explain something to me, or, heaven forbid, trawling Wikipedia. Reader, I spent upwards of an hour each and every day perusing the Times’ archives, admiring its staff writers, and absorbing its opinion section—all in the pursuit of being a gold-star informed citizen. And it was exciting!
Compared to the other outlets I had access to—kid-friendly news sites, whatever National Geographic editions remained at my school library—the NYT was obviously the top banana, and I, by proximity, felt a little prestige rub off on me.
The print edition began to arrive on my doorstep in the middle of COVID-19’s doldrums, and only served to increase my consumption of this sacred text. COVID itself increased my reliance on its work—now I had an impetus to read the paper, not just for self-edification, but to protect my health and that of those around me.
More of its coverage began to inform more of my life, and I don’t know that I was reading much other news. I heard some NPR and other local news on KQED, and I might have seen some NBC News when I watched my mother get ready for work each morning, but neither of those were “real” in my eyes.
Total supremacy of the Times.
Bored in a high school class? Pull up the Magazine section. Can’t think of an essay topic? See what’s under the “Breaking” tab, or randomize something out of its still-broken search function. The Times was always there for me, for schoolwork just as much as for entertainment, and I could trust it.
It was the ship that carried me from headlines like “BIDEN BEATS TRUMP” to “ONE MILLION” to “TRUMP STORMS BACK,” and it was unsinkable.
Ok, Sasha. Sure. You read the Times. It was awesome or something. But you’re not really convincing me that I should care that you cared.
Fine! Be that way. Here’s more:
Hand in hand with my commitment to reading each word of the daily paper was my long-standing commitment to cynicism. Not skepticism and its raised hackles, but cynicism and its stony belief in bad-faith actors.
Ask my mother, my first-grade teacher, my pediatric dentist—they would avow that I was a cynic through and through, and had been since I could speak. Never taking anything for granted, never assuming the best outcome was the most probable, never carefree—young me understood cynicism to be something like discernment.
Having an immediate cynical approach would help me sort the good from the bad and stop any kind of deception from occurring, right? When people I looked up to in my life remarked on my nascent cynicism, it felt like a nod to my intellectual achievement. It was praise, in a way.
Combine this with the seventh-grade need to do battle with annoying boys in history class and bring something interesting to the Model UN practice session, and I got the idea that cynicism made me “informed” and that being “informed” helped me be more cynical.
It’s still unclear to me what “informed” means or what the real value of being it is, but if I didn’t think too hard about it, I could simply leave it there.
Eventually, my mega-brain was so full of NYT that I could discern good from bad and trustworthy from dishonest at a glance, and never again doubt what I had already classified as informative. I had so much information. I was informed, I promise. Don’t think less of me, I’m not uninformed! I’m up to date! (With what? For who?)
This may have been a foolish attitude, but until June 5, 2025, it served me.
You may not remember this particular day, a Thursday broadly unremarkable. That evening, in the twenty-two minutes between arriving home and my father announcing dinner was ready, I opened the NYT app on my phone in the hopes of finding something for us to chat about.
Boy, did I ever.
Splashed across the front page (or the top of my screen), in all caps: “TRUMP AND MUSK SHATTER ALLIANCE.”
The striking part of this was the formatting. Historically, the Times reserves this all-caps banner (or “hammer”) headline for truly momentous news. “MEN WALK ON MOON” should provide a sufficient example. This is an atypical presentation of a headline, and it should strike you as odd.
Between “ONE MILLION” COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., “TRUMP STORMS BACK” headlining his re-election after felony conviction, and “TRUMP AND MUSK SHATTER ALLIANCE” describing a series of unfriendly tweets, one of these things is not like the others.
It was a profoundly bizarre experience to see these events given similar import by this newsroom that had previously never led me astray.
If you had read beyond the headline on this day, or honestly on any of the days in the following week, you would have seen dozens of subheadings and features and clip reels all agonizing over the Trump-Musk “meltdown.”
An army of reporters pressed into service to catalog tweets, index “Truths,” and deliver pithy jabs about the “bromance.”
For days, the airwaves were flooded with stories primarily reporting on social media interactions surrounding this breakup and sensationalizing the drama. As the Times referenced, “The girls are fighting.”
In this world where our executive administration is powered by the raw hunger of swarming locusts, in this world where the Times has explicitly recognized that a reliance on overwhelming press channels is essential to the administration’s rapacious tactics, in this world where a fake story about Elon Musk’s hypothetical Super Bowl ads received more attention than the actual struggle of people losing support from USAID, it’s pretty damn weird that the Times would spend a week rehashing and reheating this stale tidbit that is, at base, celebrity infighting.
Piece after piece from the Times editorial board implored the reader to look past Trump’s circus of misdirection, and instead see the reality of the dismantling of government services, while the Times itself hosted the circus as its big-top headliner.
It published opinions to this end at least twice (in February and again in that very same summer), but you wouldn’t know it from its simultaneous coverage of the failing relationship.
There must have been something more newsworthy that day in June, right? A way to discuss this breakup from the perspective of the American people, or the policy they were fighting over, or anything other than sheer spectacle.
The Times didn’t seem to think so.
I felt betrayed.
This was the paper to which I had near-total devotion. Its word was law. I savored its print edition every day for years and labored over each paragraph (I even braved the Athletic section, reader) in an attempt to absorb some kernel of something into myself.
Legitimacy, perhaps.
I think that’s what the cynicism and quest to “be informed” were for.
My cynicism, however, turned out to be bolstered primarily by this specific tool that I could use to rebuke everything. I had a magic dictionary of infinite knowledge at nytimes.com. I had a compulsive need to “be informed about.” Attempting to understand the second half of that phrase, the one that starts with “about” and ends somewhere still unknown to me, only led to frustration.
I knew that cynics, with such a strong sense of doubt armoring them, couldn’t be blindsided or misled. I knew enough as a cynic-in-training to ask “Why are they saying this to me?” and “Who’s funding this source?” but I didn’t know that one could say the right thing while doing the opposite.
My reliance on immediate cynicism only went so far as to address the message, but perhaps not its delivery.
Only in such a blatant example as the Trump-Musk breakup did I begin to see that.
Once I saw it, I began to see it everywhere. It was in social dynamics and false advertising, sure, but it had even become embedded in the fabric of my hometown.
Last summer was the first real span of time I’d spent at home since Trump was sworn in, and I was feeling real whiplash.
I love the Bay, the ever-shifting landscape of sea to forest to sea again, and the slow rise of SR-120 into the mountains, but I did not love returning to it.
Sure, I’d been dissatisfied with it before—SF’s pressure-cooker high schools, social climbing, and emphasis on success were tough as a teen—but the torrent of AI-wrapper companies and their associated political maneuvering were new(ish).
There had been iffy apples but they had felt like exceptions. Apparently, they weren’t.
The Bay being a top-down liberal hotbed was convenient, until it wasn’t financially advantageous for a select few CEOs. Apparently I wasn’t a Bay Area cynic in the areas where it mattered.
I believed my qualms regarding its odd value structures were anterior to the immutable reality of some beautiful, glittering Bay that I now see was temporary.
I thought the political landscape was as sturdy and dependable as the physical one, somehow physically intertwined and inseparable—but the politics can change.
This shook my attachment to physical reality, too. A slap in the face.
I now see that my cynicism mostly taught me to assign value to an entity on my first encounter with it, and apply very rigid categories of “reliable” and “unreliable” that would break before they would flex.
I had decided that my friends were good and thus wouldn’t lie, the Times was the way to be informed and legitimate, and perhaps the Bay, even, was somehow incorruptible beyond its ever-present social climbing.
I was then able to be skeptical of people or other press institutions I didn’t necessarily get on well with, because I had a shining beacon to compare these murkier ideas to.
Once the bulb died in the beacon, I was adrift.
I no longer know what to do with cynicism—or I don’t know what to do without it.
I don’t know what it is to “be informed,” and I don’t think it’s a real phrase.
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025/11/gordon-cynicism
