The Nix

by Nathan Hill

The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.

It’s because Cronkite called the Chicago police “a bunch of thugs,” and he did it live, on the air. Well, that’s what they are! And that’s what he told his producers, who said he’d made a judgment, which was wrong, since it was up to the viewers to decide whether the police were or were not thugs. He countered that he’d made an observation, which is what they paid him for: to observe and report. They said he’d expressed an opinion. He said sometimes an observation is inseparable from an opinion.

He was a good man. As good a father as he could be. Faye had simply never seen it before. Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.