Niemans @ Work

Coefficients of dispersion. Chasing the sale. Maintenance years.Three things I knew almost nothing about when I got a tip from a software engineer that something was gravely wrong with the…

December 3, 2015. We all knew it was going to be a busy day in the newsroom. The Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein, South Africa, was to rule on…

I have been fascinated with fact-checking ever since I first read about it during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Now I’m proud to have brought this tradition to Nepal and…

My NPR podcast “Hidden Brain” launched this fall, but it’s been more than a decade in the making, one that started mere blocks from Lippmann House.While reporting for The Washington Post…

My life changed on a cold, dark, rainy January morning in 2011. Worried about a modest tremor in my left hand, my doctor had referred me to a neurologist. At…

In the summers during college, I drove taxis in Philadelphia. All sorts of people opened up in the anonymity of a cab. Three decades later, while covering China for NPR,…

after 15 years of assignments in war zones around the globe, I’ve found that the hopes, dreams, and nightmares of enemies are often more similar than they are different. This…

So often, journalists are quick to dismiss stories that have been done before, especially those that have been written over and over again. But what if you could take a…

The journey to write “Equal Before the Law: How Iowa Led Americans to Marriage Equality” began April 3, 2009, when the Iowa Supreme Court granted gays and lesbians the right…

For 11 years, I worked somewhere famous.Now, I work somewhere virtually unknown.In January, I left “All Things Considered” (“ATC”)—seven months since my Nieman fellowship ended—to create a position at NPR’s…