“One reason Serial resonated with journalists is those type of questions are central to good reporting, and the podcast was the rare opportunity to air them in the open without a reporting debacle (like Rolling Stone's UVA rape article) having to happen first.
But questions about trust, truth, and decisions aren't unique to reporters — or to murder trial jurors. We all make big decisions with insufficient data. When the question is big enough, when it's a question of love, or money, or life or death, or guilt or innocence, it's hard to have enough data to say you can ever really, truly be sure.”
I think there is a lot going on in culture right now around uncertainty. I think that’s what irony is, a way to engage with uncertainty and still act by avoiding commitment to the behavior. It’s the central theme of New Girl, it was sort of what Modern Family was about at the beginning (‘so, how do we do this family thing if we aren’t all white and heterosexual?’).
A lot of moving forward as a society is admitting that some of the old absolutes we based social structures on are false (ex. women are primarily meant to be mothers and wives to men), but that we don’t know what the actual truth is and we have to be comfortable in the in-between-space while we figure it out.
We are letting ourselves be complex.
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