Sounding

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…