The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

I learned a lesson that stayed with me: concrete, lived experiences engraved themselves in my psyche far more than abstract historical events.

The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the “in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X” test, or the “X test.”

because genocide was rarely seen to implicate “traditional” national security interests, citizens would need to make political noise if they wanted Washington to do more.