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As we near the end of 2013, NPR is taking a look at the numbers that tell the story of this year — numbers that, if you really understand them, give insight into the world we're living in, right now. You'll hear the stories behind numbers ranging from zero to 1 trillion.

When it comes to race and film, the number of the year is 11.

I started the count recently at a movie theater just outside of Washington, D.C., where I met Kahlila Liverpool. We were there for a movie and a meal with the D.C. Black Film and Media Club, a local Meetup group that attends group screenings of films featuring black actors and by black directors.

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This is the fifth day of Ask Me Another's 12 Days of Xmas series.

Please enjoy this yearbook photo of the 1993 Whiffenpoofs—the premier collegiate a cappella group of Ask Me Another house musician Jonathan Coulton. Sorry, Coultron. Can you spot him?

Have you spent much of the holiday season debating whether Justin Bieber really intends to retire?

No? Well, what about the question of whether Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson was rightly suspended for making bigoted remarks, or was in fact suppressed for giving voice to traditional values?

Stories like this have flared up throughout 2013, a mix of celebrity and mini-scandals. They may not have had much to do with war or peace or anyone's ability to find work, but for a day or two Americans found diversion in making fun of Bieber for writing a fan letter to himself in the guestbook at Anne Frank's house, or the way Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio seemed to struggle to drink water during his response to President Obama's State of the Union address.

Or, of course, Miley Cyrus twerking.

There's nothing new about silly stories getting a lot of attention, but the Internet has upended old news values that demanded you put war and the economy on the front page and relegate fluff to Page 18.

"There was a structural way newspapers kept all that stuff separated," says Robert Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University. "The Internet totally annihilates that kind of structure."

If all stories are created equal, in the sense of each having its own space on a Web page, then the ones that get linked to and clicked on the most might be those that are more amusing or titillating than informative.

Even aficionados of hard news may be more likely to share via social media a funny video of a beauty pageant contestant flubbing an answer than the latest developments in the Syrian civil war.

News has always presented a mixture of information and entertainment, says Daniel Hallin, a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. Important events such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the deaths of Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher rank high on lists of this year's most-shared stories.

But in an age when the digital readership of every story can be measured, the balance has shifted more toward the fun stuff.

"News in general is just much more market-oriented than it once was," Hallin says. "Now, when click-through rates and 'most tweeted' become important criteria, the assumption is much more that you give people what they want to see."

The CNN news ticker at the corner of Sunset & Cahuenga is a real-time chronicle of the death of American journalism.

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) June 21, 2013

And it resonated with me. As the youngest of four boys, I often found it hard to come to terms with the expectations of masculinity around me: the performance of it, so to speak. Afikpo, when I was growing up, was caught in that moment between a centuries-old way of being and a more modern one. There were expectations of how one proved one's masculinity, but I wasn't interested in those. I had a fraught relationship with my father, and a sweet and gentle one with my mother.

And yet, not being gay myself, there is a level of confusion, of hurt, that I couldn't ever access. It always eluded me, made me feel like there was something more behind this story, something that was as tantalizing faint as the scent of Earl Grey Tea, but that would always remain closed to me.

And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps this is not the feeling of a straight man looking into the life of a gay man, unable to completely relate, but rather that of a self gazing deeply into another self and never ever being able to see it. Maybe it's the existential melancholy we all carry, that of knowing there is more to us, and wrestling with the frustration that it will always be out of reach, darting into our peripheral vision when we are lucky.

Whatever it is, I know that James Baldwin made me want to be a writer. More profoundly, he is largely responsible for the kind of writer that I have become. One, who like Jimmy, believes that all love is light and the only true aberration in the world is the absence of it — love, that is.

Chris Abani's new novel, The Secret History of Las Vegas, will be published by Penguin in January.

Read an excerpt of Giovanni's Room