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D. None of the above

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I’m going to start with a headline relationship that would make Niccolò Machiavelli proud and work my way toward life on Main Street. You remember Machiavelli? That’s the author who wrote “The Prince,” which was first published way back in 1532, about how to manipulate people to survive and use any means available.

Wait, please don’t go. There won’t be a test and that’s the last date I’ll put in this column. Promise.

So, I’m thinking about relationships because of the new and improved dynamic between President Donald Trump and his Best Friend for Now — BFN, anyone? — Sen. Mitch McConnell. After a few tough losses, the Republican leaders seemed testy in their exchanges.

No, no, they said earlier this week, that wasn’t so. They are buddies and they agree on everything. Well, almost everything. According to sources, the senior senator also wants two scoops of ice cream when he visits the White House, but the commander in chief has no intention of changing his ice cream policies, even for his BFN.

Anyway, what brought these two older white men together? Did they talk about what it’s like to be misunderstood? Were they eager to find a friend in Washington, D.C., and did neither of them want to get a dog, as the expression goes?

No, they came together because they need to. It’s so much easier, they decided, to agree and to work together than to disagree. That sounds reasonable, but what would Machiavelli think? I suspect he’d be thrilled. After all, it’s about surviving, learning to fight another day and moving the chess pieces of life around on the board. Fortunately, and I won’t put the date in here because I don’t want to break my promise, chess was invented before “The Prince” was published. If you want to find it, you can look it up on the internet, which is the source of all information and misinformation in the universe. So, Machiavelli would have known about chess and the need to sacrifice the short-term humiliation of needing anyone and the mutually assured long-term gain of having allies in Washington.

OK, so let’s step away from the seat of our democracy and go out into the real world. Why do the rest of us need relationships and what can they do for us?

Are we like ants and bees, who need each other for specialized jobs?

Yes and no. Certainly, I would have a hard time building my own house. I feel as if I have an incompetence allergy to the words “some assembly required.” I am also visual-arts deficient. People offer all kinds of false modesty, saying things like, “I used to ski a little” or “I used to do a bit of singing,” when they almost made the Olympic team and were a few auditions short of starring next to Julie Andrews on Broadway. I, however, am not being modest. If I were responsible for building walls and decorating them, we’d be living in caves and would be staring at uninspiring chalk drawings of woolly mammoths.

So, yes, our individual deficiencies suggest we do need each other. But, maybe, we benefit not just what we get from others.

One of my good friends is in a new relationship. He has always been in decent physical shape. He’s not much of a reader and has shied away from even the shortest of reading assignments. Anyway, he’s dating a woman who is a regular runner and an avid reader. Lo and behold, he recently beamed after completing a half marathon and is happily building his own personal library.

Maybe the best and longest lasting relationships are those that push us to find the best in ourselves. It’s not exactly Machiavelli 101 and it doesn’t require a press conference, but maybe the right relationships are those that help us develop in unexpected ways.

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What people don’t say can speak volumes.

Take the Harvey Weinstein allegations. Numerous women have come forward and described abhorrent behavior toward women by someone in power. That’s not a new phenomenon, but what’s new is the identity of the perpetrator and the time period involved — decades, it appears.

When asked about the allegations, President Donald Trump said he was “not at all surprised to see it.”

Hmm, not at all surprised? Didn’t the person whose every word and tweet gets splashed across headlines around the world have anything else to say, like, “If the allegations are true, it’s horrible and we should address this problem as a nation.” Or, “We as a country need to address this serious problem.”

No, he didn’t. In a follow-up question, a reporter asked if Weinstein’s behavior was inappropriate, and Trump responded that the movie executive said it was.

Again, not much there. I recognize this wasn’t a women’s rights forum and that he didn’t have prepared remarks or a flowing speech to cite, but he had an opportunity to address a real problem and he seemed more prepared to suggest he knew that Weinstein’s superstar public character had some tarnish.

The New York public transport system has run ads for years imploring, “If you see something, say something.”

That’s not always easy, especially when no one else might have been around to hear or see inappropriate comments or gestures.

This isn’t about political correctness: It’s about allowing people to do their best work without feeling threatened or uncomfortable. Locker room talk, or anything else that resembles a put-down for whatever reason, creates a hostile work environment.

Almost exactly a year ago, candidate Trump described several women who accused the Clintons of improper behavior towards women as “courageous” at a press conference before a debate with Hillary Clinton. While Trump hasn’t shared any such words of support for Weinstein’s victims, others have applauded them for coming forward. If Weinstein’s alleged victims had done so initially, taking on the equivalent of a movie icon could have put their careers at risk.

Gender politics are often a challenging and sore point at work. People can often dismiss inappropriate comments as being jokes or suggesting that their words weren’t what they intended.

Some jobs, like Wall Street trading, or, well, locker rooms, often involve a type of bawdy humor that is part of the culture.

But why should anyone have to tolerate it? With training and a heightened public awareness, the excuse “Well, that’s just the way it is” could turn into, “That’s not the way we do things around here.”

Pundits are suggesting that if eight women have come forward to accuse Weinstein, there are likely many more.

Then again, if he could and did engage in inappropriate conduct for decades, you have to imagine there are other men who did it, too.

Weinstein, in his own words, needs help. So, too, does the rest of society. He suggested he came from a different era. Others have taken him to task, indicating that somewhere along the line, he missed some major strides society made between whatever time period he imagined and today.

Who else is living in that era and how can we help them? Maybe, in addition to training the next set of up-and-coming managers, we should make sure the top executives — most of whom are men — understand what’s OK and what crosses a real line that is not only objectionable, but is also problematic for them and their careers.

We watch movies for many reasons: We want to be inspired, we want to understand other people and, sometimes, we want a perspective that helps us understand ourselves better. Maybe the inappropriate actions of a moviemaker can shed some more light on a problem that clearly isn’t unique to one person. A corollary to the transport ad, perhaps, should be, “If you hear something, say something.”

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Thank you, mental health workers. If it weren’t for you, we might be living with even more unimaginable tragedies.

For reasons most of us, fortunately, can only imagine at a distance, people are tormented by destructive urges. When these moments arise, hopefully, a psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor or someone in a position to recognize the signs can step in and offer support, while redirecting that person toward a course of action that’s safer for them and for society.

Much of the time, we don’t see the people who soothe the minds. When they do their job well, the sun rises in the morning, we send our children to school, we clap at the end of their concerts and we feed them their meals before sending them to bed for the night.

When I was in junior high school, I read books such as “Lord of the Flies” and “The Crucible,” which my teacher Mrs. Wickle suggested were an important way to look at the “dark side” of the heart.

At the time, I found the subjects depressing and unnecessary. Why, I thought, did I have to read about such violence or mass hysteria.

In the modern world, we are in the crosshairs of everything from overseas terrorists to storms and earthquakes and, yes, to people without an apparent ideology whose final act before they take their own lives is to commit mass murder.

We look at the faces of the victims and feel the loss of those we never met. They look like our friends and neighbors, and we know their smiles, once filled with potential, will never again light up a room.

At the same time, hundreds of people lined up for hours to do what they could — give blood — to help save those in immediate need.

Clearly, a few people in our midst have headed toward the dark side of their hearts and minds, allowing the demons that plague their lives to release the unthinkable and unimaginable.

Maybe, in addition to the discussion about gun control, we ought to appreciate the legion of mental health professionals who dedicate themselves to helping those battling against destructive urges, whose thoughts wander into the wilderness of despair.

The toll their work often takes on some of these mental health helpers is enormous, as other people’s nightmares leap from the minds of their patients into their own subconscious. The flow of information travels both ways, putting psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers at risk.

These mental health workers often talk to others in their field to help them get through the difficulties of their jobs.

They listen, they encourage, they become involved and, ultimately, they can and so often do set people on better courses in their lives, helping them feel better and live better.

By the time you read this, perhaps we’ll have an idea of what triggered the madness from this latest gunman, and maybe it will have less to do with off-the-rails thinking than with an ideology that encourages mass violence.

If it wasn’t lone-wolf insanity, but, rather, someone following instructions, we ought to find the ones who encouraged these senseless and brutal murders.

Either way, we ought to dedicate more resources to battling with the burden of a broken brain. If, somehow, a mental health professional can redirect someone who might otherwise commit incomprehensible violence, that person not only has saved a life but may have turned a would-be murderer into another conscientious citizen lining up for hours to give blood instead of planning to spill it.

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The next generation is afraid.

Can you blame them? They know about 9/11, as they should. When they’re not sending pictures of themselves and the food they’re eating to their group of best friends through social media, they read headlines and see pictures of people, just like them, who are living their lives one day and then becoming statistics the next.

This particular generation says it would pick security over freedom. Not all of them do, of course, but, in a recent discussion among some teenagers, I heard repeated arguments about how freedom is irrelevant if you’re dead.

That is a reflection of just how much the world has changed since I grew up. In my youth, I was aware of the Cold War. A nuclear war, although a possibility in the bilateral world that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union, seemed unlikely. After all, the biggest deterrent was the likelihood of mutually assured destruction. As Matthew Broderick experienced in the movie “War Games,” no one wins or, to quote the eerie computer from the movie, “the only winning move is not to play.”

In times of stress, Americans have historically pulled away from the ideals of freedom and democracy.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which ensures that someone can challenge an unlawful detention or imprisonment. During World War II, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established internment camps, where he held more than 100,000 people of Japanese decent, worried that they might be colluding with a government that had just attacked us.

At the start of the Cold War, Sen. Joseph McCarthy played into our worst fears, leading the House Un-American Activities Committee to question the beliefs and loyalties of its citizens. In the meantime, he ruined the lives of thousands of people and turned Americans against each other.

Many of these pursuits were designed to ease the minds of citizens about our friends and neighbors, some of whom might be working with an enemy and strike against us.

So, today, what are we willing to give up? And, perhaps more importantly, to whom are we surrendering these freedoms?

I recently watched a television reporter who was interviewing citizens in North Korea. He was asking them how they felt about their leader, Kim Jung-un, and the way he was rattling the saber against the United States and the rest of the world.

Not surprisingly, the North Koreans, or the translator with them, expressed unreserved support for the man who trades threats seemingly on a daily basis with President Donald Trump. Those interviewed were confident they were in good hands.

I doubt they felt comfortable expressing any other view. What consequences would they suffer if they publicly questioned their leader’s judgment? Their leader doesn’t seem receptive to opposing viewpoints.

On our shores, we can question our own leaders openly and frequently. We can gather in groups and protest.

Trump can bristle at the way the left-leaning press covers him, just as President Barack Obama shared his displeasure over the coverage from Fox News during his presidency, but presidents can’t shut down these organizations.

Early in our country’s history, our Founding Fathers, who had just emerged victorious in a costly battle with King George III of Great Britain and Ireland, didn’t want the leaders of the new nation to have unchecked power. The pioneering statesmen wanted to guarantee Americans protections from any government, domestic or international.

Every freedom we give up moves us further down a slippery slope.

For those of us who grew up before the fight against terrorism, freedom remains at the heart of the country we are protecting.

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If we stepped outside tomorrow to a 52 degree day, we’d race back inside and put on a coat.

If we opened the door in January to the same temperature, we might race back into the house to shed that same coat.

It’s all about expectations.

Our daughter figured that out several years ago. Gone are the days when she tells us she thinks she did well on a test. She doesn’t want us to ask, “What happened?” or hear us say, “Oh, but you thought you did well on that test.”

Instead, she often tamps down our expectations, indicating that we’d better brace for the equivalent of the academic cold. If she does better than expected, she won’t have to contend with questions. If she met the lowered expectations, she can say that, even if she didn’t do well, she can take consolation in knowing how she performed.

Yes, relationships are all about managing those expectations.

Let’s take a quick look at President Trump. He’s a shoot-from-the-tweet president. He frequently misspells words, gets facts wrong here and there, and attacks his opponents, his allies and anyone in between according to his mood.

Has he done the same thing as our daughter? Is he resetting our expectations? Is he pleased to redefine the notion of a modern-day president?

If, and when, he seems levelheaded, deliberate and considerate, is he climbing over a bar he reset for himself, giving us a chance to applaud the manner in which he interacted with a public prepared for a stream of anger and disdain?

Relationships, as Harry from the movie “When Harry Met Sally” knew all too well, are also about setting expectations. When Harry (played by Billy Crystal) is sharing one of his many philosophies of life with Sally (Meg Ryan), he suggests that he never takes a girlfriend to the airport early in a relationship because he doesn’t want her to ask why, later in the relationship, he doesn’t take her to the airport anymore.

Some people’s jobs, like stock market analysts, meteorologists and oddsmakers, involve setting expectations.

Built into their forecasts, meteorologists often leave the back door open, in case they’re wrong. As in, “It probably won’t rain, but there’s a 15 percent chance of precipitation today.”

While that forecast is innocuous enough, it leaves a small measure of flexibility in case the weather people missed a heavy band of rain clouds from their Doppler models, which happened recently, leaving my wife disappointed and dripping wet at her office after trudging through an unexpected shower.

Of course, a meteorologist who predicted rain every day in anywhere but Ketchikan, Alaska, where the locals say it rains 400 days a year, wouldn’t last long, as people would bristle at carrying unnecessary umbrellas through the brilliant sunshine

Many years ago, my wife and I went to see a movie. When we got to the theater, the film was sold out.

Instead of turning around, we bought tickets to a film on which we hadn’t read any reviews and knew nothing. We wound up watching “Shakespeare in Love.” We thoroughly enjoyed it, in part because we had no expectations.

Perhaps the most difficult expectations to meet, or exceed, are our own. Raising the bar for anything — the taste of the food we cook, our performance during a presentation or our ability to stay calm in a crisis — involves risk. Then again, once we clear our new expectations often enough, we know what we can expect of ourselves and can move on to bigger challenges. The rewards, even if we never tell anyone how much more we accomplished than we expected, seem well worth the risk.

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I didn’t see a horrifying and preventable accident this morning. I didn’t see a little girl, let’s call her Erica, on her way to her first week of school.

Erica, who, in our story, is 10 years old, wants to be a veterinarian, and has pictures of animals all over her room. She begged her parents so long for a kitten that they relented. They saw how well she took care of the kitten, putting drops in her eyes when she needed them, making sure she got the correct shots and even holding her kitten in the office when they had to draw blood to test for feline leukemia, which, fortunately, her kitten didn’t have.

Two years after she got her kitten, Erica continued to ask for additional animals, adding a fish, a rabbit and a hamster to her collection. Each morning, Erica wakes up and checks on all the animals in her little zoo, well, that’s what her father calls it, to see how they’re doing.

Her mother is convinced that the animals respond to her voice, moving closer to the edge of the cage or to the door when they hear her coming. When mother leaves to pick up Erica from school, the animals become restless.

I didn’t see Erica walking with her best friend Jenna. Like Erica, Jenna has a dream. She wants to pitch for the United States in softball in the Olympics. Jenna is much taller than her best friend and has an incredible arm. Jenna hopes the Olympics decides to have softball when she’s old enough and strong enough to play. Jenna thinks bringing a gold medal to her father, who is in the Marines and has traveled the world protecting other people, would be the greatest accomplishment she could ever achieve.

I didn’t see a man, whom I’ll call Bob and who lives only four blocks from Erica and Jenna, put on his carefully pressed light-blue shirt with the matching tie that morning. I didn’t witness him kissing his wife Alicia, the way he does every morning before he rushes off to his important job. I didn’t see him climb into his sleek SUV and back quickly out of his driveway on the dead-end block he and Alicia chose more than a dozen years earlier.

I didn’t see Bob get the first indication from his iPhone 7 that he had several messages. I didn’t witness Bob rolling his eyes at the first few messages. I didn’t see him drive quickly toward the crosswalk where Erica and Jenna were walking. The girls had slowed down in the crosswalk because Jenna pointed out a deer she could see across the street in a backyard. Jenna knew Erica kept an animal diary and she was always on the lookout for anything her friend could include in her cherished book.

I didn’t see Bob — his attention diverted by a phone he had to extend to see clearly — roll too quickly into the crosswalk, sending both girls flying. I didn’t see the ambulances racing to the scene, the parents with heavy hearts getting the unimaginable phone calls, and the doctors doing everything they could to fix Jenna’s battered right arm — her pitching arm.

I didn’t see it because it didn’t happen. What I did see, however, was a man in an SUV, driving way too quickly through a crosswalk, staring at his phone instead of looking out for Erica, Jenna and everyone else’s children on his way to work.

It’s an old message that we should repeat every year: “School is open, drive carefully.”

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How difficult must it be to become someone else? Somehow, Abby Mueller, an actress who probably isn’t a household name, transforms into the legendary singer Carole King in the Broadway musical “Beautiful.”

It’s a risky proposition. Many of us already know songs like “So Far Away” and “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which means we know what the song should sound like, even if we can’t sing it in tune.

And yet, Mueller, who is clearly the star of a show about another star, pulls it off incredibly well, giving us the energy, the soul, the innocence and the ambition of a remarkable talent.

Watching and, more importantly, listening to the show is a transformative experience. Music has that remarkable power, bringing us back to a car when we might have often heard “Up on the Roof” or sending us back in our minds to a dance party where we threw ourselves across the floor of a friend’s house as we invented our own steps to “The Loco-Motion,” where “everybody’s doing a brand new dance, now.”

Even though the dance isn’t so brand new anymore, it feels revived when we watch the high energy action on stage.

My wife and I snuck away before the end of the summer to see the musical, which left us humming and singing the songs through the next day.

The musical itself, like many other Broadway stories, is a collection of dialogue, a loose story and a compilation of rollicking music. The story line follows the musical career of King and her writing partner and husband Gerry Goffin, whom she married when she was 17 and pregnant. The audience feels as if it’s witnessing the birth of these songs, as Goffin pairs his familiar lyrics to the music King wrote.

The first half of the show, which is considerably longer than the second, is like a collection of musical candy tossed to a hungry audience.

I snuck glances around the room at some of the other people fortunate enough to take a musical joyride and I saw that, like me, several of the guests, who were mostly in their late 40s and older, had smiles plastered on their faces.

The second act doesn’t contain as many songs and delves into the more challenging and sadder parts of King’s life, where she endures the hardship of her husband’s infidelities and the creative tension that sometimes won the battle over his creative talent.

King, as we know, lands on her feet, becoming the legendary composer, singer and songwriter who was inducted with Goffin into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 for their songwriting.

The energy on stage throughout the show, with performances by a talented team reviving the style and moves of the Shirelles and the Drifters, rival the thrill of watching the cast of “Mamma Mia!” who belted out the familiar Abba songs.

The difference here, however, is that the script is not a plot written to tie together songs, but evolves as the backstory behind the early days of music that long ago circled the United States and the world.

“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” definitely lives up to the awards it has won, including the 2015 Grammy for best musical theater album and its two Tony Awards in 2014, which include a well-deserved honor for Mueller.

The only speed bump during this otherwise wonderful ride is the dramatic downshifting in the second act, where the drama, while no doubt true to life, slows the musical momentum. Still, the conclusion and the experience are rewarding, allowing us to reconnect with the legendary singer’s past, and our own.

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I’m not a scientist and I don’t play one on TV. Nonetheless, I think science is undervalued in America. I believe the typical American takes science for granted, thinks science owes them something and figures they’ll never understand what scientists are saying.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

For starters, science isn’t just about trying to create the best iPhone, the highest quality and thinnest televisions, or medicines that act like magic bullets, destroying evil in our cells or our DNA without damaging the healthy ones.

Science often starts with a question. Why or how does something work? And, perhaps, if we change something about the way it works, does it get better or worse? The conclusions scientists draw when they solve one puzzle leads to the next set of questions.

It’s as if a child asks his parent if he can go west and the parent says, “No, don’t go west, but here are the keys to the car.”

The answer may seem like a non sequitur, but it’s also a way to navigate somewhere new, even if, for whatever reason, the car isn’t supposed to go west. Maybe, by learning more about the car and where it can go, the child also learns what’s so forbidding about going west, too.

We want science to succeed and we’re annoyed when science doesn’t solve our problems. We can’t get something to work or we can’t get ourselves to work and we blame scientists. After all, if we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we conquer the morning rush hour or the common cold?

Then again, how does the study of dark matter — neutrinos or sphingolipids — affect our morning commute? We may not understand these areas, but that doesn’t mean basic knowledge can’t or won’t lead to advances we can’t anticipate.

Knowledge, as we know, is power. If we know, for example, that an enemy is planning an attack and we know where and how that attack will occur, we can defend ourselves, even if that enemy exists at a subcellular level.

Learning the playbook of the enemy takes time, which technological innovation, dedicated researchers and people battling against a disease often don’t have.

Worst of all, though, science is somehow too hard to understand. That is a defeatist conclusion. Yes, scientists use technical terms as shorthand and, yes, they may not be selling ideas or themselves in the kind of carefully crafted tones often reserved for CEOs or politicians.

That, however, doesn’t mean they are planting a keep-out sign in front of them or their ideas. While scientists reduce a question to an attainable goal, they also often keep a larger goal in mind.

A few years ago, my daughter had to draw a picture of what she thought a scientist looked like. Rather than imagine a person in a white lab coat with one pocket full of pens and the other holding a radiation badge, she drew a baby.

Science may be frustrating because scientists often come across as uncertain. For example, they might say, “We believe that the shadow in our telescope may be caused by an exoplanet orbiting a star that’s outside the solar system, and which is the same distance from its nearest star as Earth is from the sun.”

Scientists can be wrong, just as anyone can be wrong in their job, in their opinions or in their conclusions. That, however, doesn’t make science wrong. Scientists are often most excited when a discovery they make defies their expectations or bucks conventional wisdom.

Just because conventional scientific wisdom changes doesn’t mean every part of it is wrong.

Science doesn’t have all the answers and it never will. The most likely person to tell you that, though, should be a scientist, not a journalist.

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Ever walk into a room and wonder why you’re there? As I say to my wife when she looks up expectantly if I appear and then stop in my tracks, I get distracted by air.

We are flooded by stimuli from the bird soaring overhead, to the vibrating cellphone alerting us to an incoming message, to the lists that run in our heads. We have numerous opportunities to lose track of the principle task we assigned ourselves.

I’ve decided on a mantra to deal with these moments and others through the day: “While I’m here.” Yes, I know that’s not exactly a new turn of phrase and I know it’s a type of mindfulness, but my suggestion is about hearing and responding to the phrase.

For example, I might walk into a drugstore to buy shampoo and conditioner. I might realize, before I head to the checkout line, that “while I’m here,” I might also get some dental floss. After all, it’s not like dental floss spoils and, if you’ve seen the movie “Prelude to a Kiss,” you know the old man, once he returns to his own body, advises the young couple at the beginning of their marriage to floss. After several painful episodes with gums that had previously been a breeding ground for painful bacteria, I can attest to the value of that advice.

If you’re a suburban parent and you’re sitting at another baseball game, at a concert or at a dance recital, let’s imagine you’re waiting for the action to begin. “While you’re here” you might want to talk to the parent sitting near you and ask about his or her life or job.

“Hey, wait,” you say. “You’re in the same industry as I am? I had no idea. Of course, I’d love to write an elaborate freelance article that you’ll feature on the cover of your glossy magazine and that will lead to a long and fruitful business collaboration.”

That might not happen, but it certainly won’t if you dive deep into your cellphone to tell someone in another state that you’re not sure whether you’re going to eat the leftover salad from lunch or order chicken with broccoli from the Chinese restaurant down the street.

Maybe you’re at a job interview and you’ve hit all the talking points. You said your only serious flaw is that you take work so seriously that you won’t rest until you’ve secured whatever victories the company needs to beat its closest rivals.

“While you’re here,” however, you might also want to make sure you ask enough questions about the interviewers, so you know their career paths and so you have a better idea of the people with whom you’ll interact if they offer you the job.

Not all the “while you’re here” moments have to be of immediate benefit to you. You might, for example, be on a beach on one of the final days of summer and a strong wind might blow someone’s hat toward you. “While you’re here” you might want to help that person retrieve it. Or maybe you see a plastic wrapper heading into the water. “While you’re here” you also might want to grab this offensive litter and bring it to a garbage can so that it doesn’t damage a fish or a turtle.

If we consider a few times a day what we can do “while we’re here,” we might not only become more efficient, but we also might make that unexpected trip into the room worthwhile. The moment when we’re trying to recall what drove us into the room can transform into an opportunity … “while we’re here.”

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Journalists need to embrace Detective Sgt. Joe Friday’s line from “Dragnet,” “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Caught up in intense public passions, journalists can either throw their opinions at the inflamed cacophony or they can seize an opportunity to do something that has escaped most politicians: Represent broader interests.

We live in a world of spin, where claims and counterclaims come out so rapidly that reality has become a blur. The challenges in sifting through fact and fiction have increased as officials of all stripes shout their truths from the rooftops, even if they have an obstructed view of the world down below.

When I was in journalism school more than two decades ago, a good friend from Bulgaria, who was one of the few people who could pronounce my name correctly when she read it in my mailbox, shared her writing with me.

I noticed a flaw in the way she recorded dialogue. The quotes in her story often lacked the syntax and vocabulary that native English speakers possess. When I asked if she only spoke with other Bulgarians, she playfully punched my shoulder and said she needed to hear better.

That was an unintentional consequence of the way someone who spoke three languages translated the world.

The chasm today between what people say and what others hear, even those who speak the same language, has gotten wider. Editors and reporters return to their desks or take out their laptops, ready to share quotes, events and facts.

These fellow members of the media may find themselves seeing what they want to see, much like the parent of an athlete on a field or a coach who has become an advocate or cheerleader. In editorials, where we’re clearly sharing an opinion, that works, but in news reports we should share the facts, offer context — and increase the value of fact-based reporting.

With facts under regular assault, the search for them, and the ability to verify them, becomes even more important.

A divided nation needs balanced, fair, accurate and defensible reporting. In their publications, scientists share materials and methods sections, which should allow other researchers to conduct the same experiments and, presumably, find the same results. Far too often, opinions disguised as news urge people to trust the writer. Why? Readers should be able to pull together the same raw materials and decide for themselves.

I know government officials don’t always deal in facts. I also know numbers can be repackaged to suit an agenda, turning any conclusion into a specious mix of farce and mental acrobatics. To wit, he’s the best left-handed hitter every Tuesday there’s a full moon below the Mason-Dixon line. Just because it’s presented as a fact doesn’t mean we have to report it or even mock it. If it’s meaningless, then leave it alone. The argument that other journalists are doing it doesn’t make it acceptable.

Several years ago, someone called to berate me for what he considered errors in my story. Rather than shout him down, I gave him the chance to offer his perspective. Eventually he calmed down and we had a measured, detailed discussion. This became the first of numerous conversations and interactions in which he provided important perspectives and shared details I might not otherwise have known.

Reporters face a public acutely aware of its own anger. Almost by definition in a country where the two major political parties struggle to find common ground, some group of readers disagrees with our coverage. We shouldn’t try to please everyone. In fact, we should try to please no one — we should merely work harder. It’s time to allow facts to speak for themselves.

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