, Columnist
A Pessimist Confronts Good News in a Bad Year
From Ukraine to Bali, Egypt, Brazil and the US, from battlefields to pipelines and markets, the headlines give cause for optimism.
They’re optimists now in Kherson.
Photographer: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
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Temperamentally, I’m closer to Cassandra than Pollyanna. For example, I’ve always considered the eponymous American aerospace engineer Edward Murphy a reckless optimist. His famous Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Wrong? Try disastrous.
With that out of the way, I’m surprising myself this month with uplifting sentiments. The world is an awful mess. But there are signs that we’re starting to sort things out. A lot could actually get better, or at least stop getting worse.