I loved James Fallows’ riff on his favorite question to ask as a journalist:
In a variety of weird settings, it turns out to be variants of, “How can this be?” For instance: When I was living in China, I found it very hard to put two parts of reality together. One was all the data I saw, and stories I read, about China’s ever-larger financial holdings in the United States. China was rich! The other was what I saw around me all day every day: namely, a country that was absolutely full of poor people. So I started going to economists and financiers and bankers and saying, “How can this be?” Over the years, the most reliable guide to what will make a “good story” – in my particular venue of The Atlantic – is something that lends itself to “how can this be?” treatment. There’s usually an explanation for why things are the way they are. That is, the answer is usually not, “I have no idea ‘How this can be,’ it’s purely random.”
