Mm

... you know, making good money.

And, you know, things had changed so much, and I found it very strange.

There was just something implausible about these babies being discarded because it's also a very thrifty recycling culture.

And I think the timing here is very important.

I moved to China in 2007, and this was right before the Beijing Summer Olympics, and it was also the dawning of Chinese social media.

There was, um, something called QQ that was, like, a precursor to WeChat and some of the other, other sites.

[laughs]

Oh

...

in the US would be...

She could have flown to the moon, you know? They didn't know where she was.

But I thought she had been adopted, and I tracked her down through some social media sites for adoptive parents, and these babies were very cute and the parents wanted to boast about them, and so there were a lot of pictures of these girls riding ponies, and in their ballet classes, and in their gymnastics classes.

And anyway, I knew, I knew, you know, when this girl was taken, I knew what she looked like because I met her twin, and I had a pretty good idea of which orphanage had handed her, so I did find her.

But back, back to why I wrote this.

Largely

Yeah

... punished for having the second daughter.

And the, the paternal grandfather was really pushing them to try for a son.

This is, the son carries on the family name and conducts rituals at the cemetery, blah, blah, blah.

So they pushed them and pushed them and pushed them, and the, the mom, young mom at the time, hid out actually in a bamboo grove, that's where this comes from, to give birth secretly so nobody would see she was pregnant.

People could be...

You know, pregnant wom- women were often picked up-

when someone says that to you.

Why do you think right now, if we're thinking about the erosion of truth, is a different or distinct

moment? Barbara.

You know, I teach a... journalism course and I teach a course on actually it's called Covering Repressive Regimes to undergraduates and I always start by saying all regimes are repressive and that all people lie and this is very typical of journalism classes.

They start out interviewing their classmates and then try to figure out where their classmates are lying because we all lie.

But the deliberate assault on the truth, you know, emanating from the Trump administration, I'm not saying Trump is the first president to lie, but the very deliberate lying and the...

They don't even try to make it plausible.

And the idea is that the bigger the lie, the bigger the show of power.

So I'm interested in getting a sense of the harms that can happen when the truth is hidden, both to people's own psyches, but also to a whole

[laughs]

... which is part of the, the problem we're having.

Americans, you know, can be very checked out, and we don't think that they're in the center of the world and they don't need to pay attention, so we have to, to work harder.

But I think in general, I agree with Liz, there's more foreign news is more relevant to people's lives in terms of who their neighbors are, in terms of who the immigrants are, um, in terms of their, their gasoline prices, which is a big issue right now.

I mean, I think the problem is not the news itself.

I think people are consuming more foreign news, it's just that they're not paying for it.

You know, they're getting it, it's frankly stolen by the social media companies and, you know, they take our stuff.

[laughs]