Journalism

Letter to an Aspiring Correspondent

PRAGUE – Foreign correspondence is dead. Long live foreign correspondence!

Feng Jianmei, a 23-year-old frail woman was lying in hospital bed in a shabby hospital in western China’s Shaanxi province, her black long hair covering her face. Lying next to her was the body of her unborn baby that was aborted. The fetus was bloody and showed signs of struggling before her short life was ended by ruthless officials using a poisonous injection.

MASERU, Lesotho – My Hungarian in-laws didn’t take the news well.

[Author note: To glimpse some of the future faces of Chinese media – my students – please click here.]

When we get a whiff of inauthenticity, we are made aware of just what we expect from nonfiction. So says award-winning author Jonathan Weiner. He sat on a panel alongside the thoughtful and amusing Amitava Kumar and Carmela Ciuraru. Brooklyn Book Festival's panel, Unreliable Subjects, focused on the complexity of dealing with subjects (that is, people) who are inherently unreliable. What are the dangers and ramifications of writing nonfiction that is based on the testimony of someone who is shady, or a fringe character?

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – Western intervention in Libya – and in the Arab Spring itself – has revived debate over “exporting our values,” especially the kinder, gentler, non-militaristic forms of soft power.

David A. Andelman is the Editor of World Policy Journal. Previously he served as Executive Editor of Forbes.com. Earlier, he was a domestic and foreign correspondent for The New York Times in various posts in New York and Washington, as Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Bangkok, then East European bureau chief, based in Belgrade.

BRATISLAVA –From the slumber of their winter hibernation, I've pulled our bicycles from the depths of our cartoonishly overstuffed hall closet.

Dad’s self-appointed task: wipe down the dust and cobwebs, pump some life into those tires. Sure, I’ve suffered minor injuries, like a bruised shin, but I get no sympathy from this crowd.

There's another cost, too. When you go so many months between riding a bicycle, as we did from fall to spring, certain muscles grow dormant. Guess what? They begin to atrophy. At least at my age, they do.