I came into journalism in a roundabout way. I was a voracious reader as a child, growing up in middle-class Nairobi, partly as a retreat from a difficult home situation as my parents’ marriage broke down. I spent hours poring over world maps, absorbing obscure facts from encyclopedias, and reading all manner of novels from Dickens classics to Sweet Valley High. Read more
The very first time I viewed a William H. Johnson painting, the work moved me so deeply, I immediately declared him my favorite artist. I was barely a teenager. I didn’t have a sophisticated, refined eye and … Read more
While on assignment in Somalia a few years back, I found myself sitting in the waiting room of the Mogadishu mayor’s office alongside a dozen Somali men—some in white robes, some in baggy suits. One of them—an old man with a … Read more
My grandmother was well known for telling extraordinary tales. One in particular has stuck with me since the summer I was dispatched alone to her in Delhi. At the time I was living in Kuwait where my father had found … Read more
Two years ago, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gave me the reporting opportunity of a lifetime—go to the Dominican Republic and Cuba to write about the dynamics of the baseball culture on each island. In … Read more
Three years ago I worked as a news editor at Donbass, the largest newspaper and news website in my native city of Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine. I was responsible for a dozen reporters covering local news, three pages of the … Read more
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
