Here is a headline that contradicts itself in two sentences:

I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now.
The New York Times | Nov. 20, 2024 | Lydia Polgreen

And here is the opening paragraph. The peg. The grabber. The who/what/when/where/why of every news story:

For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

I guess if you have unlimited time in your life, then you have time to read NYT drivel about somebody else’s mother’s closet clutter. What, after all, is a newspaper of broken records for?

Don’t worry: she gets down to brass tacks, very sensitively and inclusively, in paragraph 2:

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is forgetful. She misplaces things all the time. It would turn up, I was sure.

In paragraph 3, she sidles up to the point:

What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country? Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

But then sidles away from it. Does her mother have documentation or not? We’ll never know. At least, not while the New York Times can control information. Trump’s Gestapo may very well be at the door!