How to process the news when it all feels bad
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2024
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The FT’s foreign editor Alec Russell has been reporting on crises around the world for more than 30 years. He was in Romania during the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, in South Africa for the fall of apartheid, and in 1994 he reported on the genocide in Rwanda. So when we recently felt ourselves losing hope at the news from Gaza and Ukraine, we decided to ask him: is this an especially tough time in history, or does it just feel that way? And what has he learned from being present for so much of history? Today, Alec gives us tips for finding perspective, and tells us where he finds hope.
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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap and we’re on X @lifeandartpod. You can email us at lifeandart@ft.com. We are grateful for reviews, on Apple, Spotify, etc.
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Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):
– Alec’s piece commemorating 30 years since Rwanda’s genocide is here: https://on.ft.com/3QnQbfx
– You may also be interested in Alec Russell’s book After Mandela: the Battle for the Soul of South Africa
– Alec is on X @AlecuRussell
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. |
| 0:03.8 | I'm Lila Raptopoulos. |
| 0:06.1 | On this podcast, we mostly focus on cultural topics that are relatively pleasant, movies and books. |
| 0:13.1 | Sometimes we talk about things like managing time, but it's always in service of helping listeners make time for the things that they find rewarding. |
| 0:24.2 | The thing we're often thinking about here is how to live a good life. |
| 0:30.4 | But life isn't always good, and the new cycle over the past few months has felt relentless and hard. |
| 0:33.7 | Israel's war in Gaza can seem unresolvable. |
| 0:39.2 | Russia's war in Ukraine, two years in, is still going strong. There's a lot of anxiety about the future. It's easy for things to feel worse than ever, darker, more unknown. |
| 0:45.8 | My colleague Alec Russell is the FTs foreign editor, and he's just one of the wisest people that I |
| 0:51.3 | know at finding perspective in the face of atrocities. He recently |
| 0:55.3 | wrote a piece commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which he reported on in the 90s. |
| 1:01.2 | And he's here with us today to talk through some of these questions. Alec, hi, welcome to the show. |
| 1:07.1 | Oh, Lila, hello. Very good to be back on the show. That's really, really, really nice to have you. So I thought maybe we could start by telling listeners a little bit about your background. I think a lot about how you were really at a lot of turning points in history. You were in Romania after the Berlin Wall fell under Chowcesterscu. You were in South Africa during the fall of apartheid, you were in Rwanda. |
| 1:30.2 | This is a big question to start with. |
| 1:36.4 | But I'm curious if being in the middle of these conflicts ever made you feel despair. |
| 1:41.3 | In some of them, yes. |
| 1:50.4 | And I think two in particular, Yugoslavia, which had this awful, awful civil war from 92 to 95, |
| 1:56.6 | and then Rwanda in 94, where there was the world's worst genocide since the Holocaust. |
| 2:07.4 | And I think it was hard to report on those two crises, conflicts, atrocities, nightmares without losing faith in humanity, actually. |
| 2:11.5 | Yeah. |
| 2:12.9 | You know, I am asking partially because I think a lot of people are having a hard time |
| 2:17.9 | coping right now. Of course, most people listening aren't seeing firsthand, sort of the wars that |
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