Meg Greenfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of The Washington Post, delivered the commencement address at Williams College in 1987. As one of the most influential voices in American journalism, she used the occasion to challenge a deeply ingrained intellectual habit: the assumption that pessimism is inherently more honest than optimism. Greenfield argued that reflexive negativity had become a kind of intellectual currency — a way to signal sophistication and seriousness. But she pointed out that the person who always says things are terrible is just as unreliable as the person who always says things are wonderful. Neither is actually looking at reality; both are substituting a posture for genuine analysis. For journalists and citizens alike, the harder and more valuable work is honest assessment, which sometimes requires acknowledging that things are going well.