I often feel my job is to trick people into paying attention to the world around them. Beauty, light, and composition are my tools to draw one’s eye into the events and issues many would rather avoid. When I started … Read more
The first time I invited my readers to meet up at a coffee shop, one person came. His name was Jimmy. He was a fan of my geeky news and conversation blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and after we … Read more
When Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest typhoons ever recorded, slammed into the Philippines in 2013, I rushed there from Bangkok to report on it with my colleagues from The Associated Press. In the city of Tacloban, we found … Read more
When I started out in network news, I was all about the big, lead story. There’s a sense in most newsrooms that those are the ones that are the most important, the most meaningful. I’m not a political junkie, … Read more
As a legal reporter in China for the past six years, I have spent a lot of time in courthouses. Judges almost always bar reporters from sitting in courtrooms and policemen frequently shoo us away from the … Read more
When I hear the “All Things Considered” theme, I hear vegetables sizzling in a pan. I think about being 6 years old and playing with toys at the kitchen table while my mom cooked dinner and caught up with … Read more
Last fall, I sat in on a class at Harvard University filled with students who were working on graduate degrees in higher education. The professor posed a simple but enlightening question. She asked how many of us had attended … Read more
Growing up, if my sister and I were reading, we didn’t have to do chores. So, we read all the time. We loved a good story. My mother wanted us to read work by the poets. Gwendolyn Brooks was … Read more
Iwas 5 or 6 years old when my mother, a great lover of Nigerian folklore, told me a story from one of the oldest tribes in my country. In my mother’s telling, the market woman named Emotan became a … Read more
I have lived most of my adult life out of a single suitcase, zigzagging a career through the Caucasus and the Middle East. But I had never plumbed for inspiration or reason. In the introduction to my first book I … Read more
