Connecting the Chinese Dots

After more than four decades in journalism, I’ve come to see my craft as a type of non-fiction pointillism.

Like its counterpart in painting, in which a multitude of dots are used to create patterns that form an image, daily journalism cranks out coverage of tiny bits of what will become history. If you assemble the bits, step back and take a look at the picture that emerges, you can get a good idea of where things are headed.