The world needs more Nick Kristofs

If you’re a big reader, you can probably point to a book or two that changed the course of your life. For me, it was a 1997 New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof about diarrhea, which was killing three million kids a year.

At the time, I had wealth—and knew I planned to give it away—but no clear mission. Nick’s article gave me one. I faxed it to my dad with a note: “Maybe we can do something about this.”

That ended up setting the direction for what became the Gates Foundation. It didn’t just give us a what—it gave us a how. Nick’s reporting showed us that the biggest challenge in global health isn’t always discovering new breakthroughs. Often, it’s making sure the tools we already have—vaccines, medicines, bed nets, or oral rehydration therapies for rotavirus—reach every child, no matter where they’re born.

Reading Nick’s new memoir, Chasing Hope, brought me back to that moment and showed me how it fit into the bigger story of his life. The book is a deeply personal account of a life spent documenting injustice and refusing to look away, whether it’s genocide in Darfur, refugee camps in Sudan, or the streets of his hometown in rural Oregon.

Nick’s impulse to go where the suffering is, and to make people care, has defined his career. He’s reported from more than 150 countries, covering war, poverty, health, and human rights. He and his longtime collaborator and wife, Sheryl WuDunn, won a Pulitzer Prize for their work. Together and individually, they’ve brought injustices around the world into view for millions of readers.

But Chasing Hope isn’t just a greatest-hits collection of his past reporting. It’s the story of how someone becomes Nick Kristof. He writes about growing up on a sheep and cherry farm in Oregon, driving tractors as a teenager, and nearly becoming a lawyer before deciding on journalism. He also reflects on the toll his career has taken on him, his family, and his capacity for hope.

I’ve known Nick for many years now, and I’ve admired his work since that 1997 rotavirus column. On paper, we don’t seem all that similar. He’s a journalist, I’m a technologist; he tells stories, I talk numbers. But reading Chasing Hope, I was struck by what we have in common: growing up in the Pacific Northwest, learning about the value of service from our parents, thinking globally.

We both attended Harvard and left early—me because I dropped out, him because he graduated in three years before heading to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. But neither of us ever stopped learning. I think we both believe the world’s pretty interesting if you remain a student.

Nick’s curiosity didn’t come out of nowhere, and neither did his sense of purpose. His mother was an art history professor and a civic leader who helped influence local politics. His father, a political science professor who fled both Nazism and communism, believed deeply in education and the responsibilities that come with freedom. That kind of upbringing left a mark on him and shaped the kind of journalist he became.

Over decades, he’s built a career reporting on crises that are often ignored because they happen in far-off places, far from centers of power. In Chasing Hope, he recounts his experiences chronicling river blindness in Ethiopia, maternal mortality in Cameroon, and malaria in Cambodia. Through the foundation, I mobilize science, data, and funding to address many of the same global challenges Nick reports on. Our approaches are different, but the underlying questions we ask (and try to answer) are the same: Why are some lives valued less than others? And how can we use the tools we have—information, resources, attention—to close that gap?

Nick has an admirable commitment to nuance, especially when it comes to hard subjects like China. Nick lived there for years, speaks Mandarin, and understands the country in a way most Western commentators don’t. I’ve always appreciated his ability to go beyond the headlines—and focus not just on what’s going wrong, but on what’s changing and why it matters.

Nick is also an optimist, which might sound strange given the kinds of suffering he writes about. But his work is grounded in a belief I share: The right data—or the right story—can move people to act. As Nick puts it, “A central job of a journalist is to get people to care about some problem that may seem remote.” People, when given the chance, want to make things better. Progress, while never guaranteed, is possible.

That optimism feels especially important, if increasingly difficult, right now. Isolationism is on the rise around the world, and governments are cutting back on foreign aid at the very moment when we should be doing more, not less. Millions of lives are at stake. Nick’s work reminds us what’s possible when we care about people beyond our own borders—and what happens when we don’t.

Chasing Hope made me think a lot about what kind of person chooses to run toward the hardest problems—and keep going back until they’re solved. It also made me think the world would be a much better place if there were more Nick Kristofs. In the meantime, we’re lucky to have this one.