Nicholas Christov has won two Pulitzer Prizes, covering some of recent history's worst atrocities.

The Tiananmen Square massacre in China, genocide, and therefore.

But he became aware of the reality so many of us know as consumers of news

that reporting from devastating situations can be overwhelming,

numbing our sense of whether it matters that we care what difference we could possibly make.

So, Nicholas Christov began to draw on new science that reveals the limits of human empathy,

why it shuts down and how to open it again.

I gained a new appreciation for his journalistic ethos through an HBO documentary

reporter that followed him to Congo.

We'll listen to some scenes from that film as we explore what Nicholas Christov has learned

from looking straight on at some of the hardest things in the world.

Journalism and Compassion.

I'm Christa Tippett, this is on being from APM American Public Media.

I interviewed Nicholas Christov in 2010.

He's been an op-ed colonist for the New York Times since 2001.

He followed a well-trodden path to the Times,

writing for the Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate,

freelancing as a journalist while studying law as a road scholar at Oxford.

And he had two university professors as parents.

But Nicholas Christov's father was also an Armenian Romanian immigrant,

who came to the U.S. after surviving his own political traumas.

And he raised his son on a farm in Oregon reminiscent of the lost land of his childhood.

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