I can’t stop thinking about Don Bolles’ Datsun.

I know. I’m a theory bore. But I did get a journalism degree for it, sooooo….

Journalism has always had its archetypes. There is the bloodhound, the obsessive sniffer who will happily dig through trash bags until a clue appears. Bob Woodward built a career like that, wearing out shoes and sources until the story coughed itself up. There is the sleuth, the detective type, epitomized by Seymour Hersh at his most relentless. He would find a small discrepancy, a contradiction no one else noticed, and then tug on the thread until the entire national-security sweater fell apart. And then there is the third archetype, the one I reluctantly own: the dot-connector.

I am not the one who dumpster-dives or coaxes out secret folders in a midnight diner. My trick is taking something small and overlooked, some mundane data point or tossed-off quote, and placing it in context so suddenly you see the entire spiderweb around it. It is the zero to one moment, when the story stops being flat and starts being alive.

That is why Don Bolles haunts me. He was the bloodhound, running down Arizona land fraud and Mafia ties. And what did it get him? A bomb under the chassis of his 1976 Datsun 710. A car so plain it was invisible: compact, reliable, fitted with oversized bumpers to satisfy U.S. safety regulators, one of the countless Japanese imports that defined middle-class practicality in the 1970s. You can still see the photos. A once-unremarkable little sedan torn open like a can of sardines. The interior shredded, the metal buckled. An everyday car turned into a national monument to violence against the press.

The car matters because it is the metaphor. Bolles drove something ordinary, and it became extraordinary. Journalism is like that. You take a stack of dull records, a boring hearing transcript, an empty parking lot, and suddenly they crack open into the story of the decade. The Datsun became the embodiment of that shift. A disposable commodity elevated into a museum artifact, a steel witness to what it costs to tell the truth.

I sometimes feel so very lost, a child of both journalism and technology. On one hand, I come from the lineage of Bolles and Woodward and Hersh, who trusted shoe leather, gut instinct, and pure stubbornness. On the other hand, I live in a world where I can throw an archive of notes into an AI and get back a pattern I might have missed entirely. I know AI is not a source. It is not chasing, sniffing, or interrogating. But it is a kind of turbocharged context machine. It lets me hold dozens of puzzle pieces in my head at once without dropping any, and that feels like magic.

Here is the dirty truth: journalism has never been bottlenecked by writers. Anyone can produce more words than readers want. The bottleneck has always been context. It has always been the hard, slow process of working out what connects to what, and why it matters. AI does not replace that, but it accelerates it. It turns me into the dot-connector I always suspected I was.

I do not know if Bolles would recognize what I am doing as journalism. His Datsun sits in storage now, battered and mute, a relic from a time when the danger of chasing truth was measured in sticks of dynamite. My danger is different: it is the risk of drowning in too much data, too much noise, too much speed. But the principle is the same. Ordinary things can explode into extraordinary stories. That is the work. That is the risk. That is the calling.