European society was historically divided into a general hierarchy known as the three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the hoi polloi—that is, everyone else. Working along those lines, the Parliament of the United Kingdom classifies its members in a similar system: the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons. It was during a sitting of the House of Commons that Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament in the late 18th century, apparently identified a new type of estate.

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century historian, in his book On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History. Both he and Burke recognized the strange contradiction experienced by journalists: the necessity of being both part of and separate from the world, of creating impartial accounts of tumultuous events even as they’re living through them—something Sally Hayden understands only too well.

This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter’s Search for Goodness in a Cruel World, Sally Hayden, Scribner, 304 pp., $30, June 2026

European society was historically divided into a general hierarchy known as the three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the hoi polloi—that is, everyone else. Working along those lines, the Parliament of the United Kingdom classifies its members in a similar system: the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons. It was during a sitting of the House of Commons that Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament in the late 18th century, apparently identified a new type of estate.

“Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century historian, in his book On Heroes, Hero Worship & the Heroic in History. Both he and Burke recognized the strange contradiction experienced by journalists: the necessity of being both part of and separate from the world, of creating impartial accounts of tumultuous events even as they’re living through them—something Sally Hayden understands only too well.

Journalist Sally Hayden in Juba, South Sudan, on March 22, 2024.Guy Peterson

Hayden, an award-winning Irish journalist and author, has spent her career living out the maxim that good journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, often reporting from war zones, disaster sites, and politically unstable regions fraught with violence. Her work has helped the rest of the world understand what’s happening on the ground in real time, and to say that she has risked her life in order to be a voice for the voiceless is not an exaggeration. But she is also keenly aware that the zoomed-out journalistic view, which is necessary for relaying the broad scope of a situation in brief and digestible communiqués, means sacrificing details about the people involved, smoothing out the texture of their lives and folding it into........

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