Three projects, and a question that kept getting more personal.

01 · 2006

PostGlobal

I helped launch PostGlobal with Fareed Zakaria and David Ignatius and helped get it off the ground. Each week we put one question to about 60 leading writers around the world and published what came back.

It worked. But the answers came from people who write for a living, and after a while I wanted to know what everyone else thought.

02 · 2007–08

How the World Sees America

So I spent a year traveling to twelve countries asking ordinary people how they saw the United States, and filming them. A Kashmiri insurgent. A settler in Hebron. A Venezuelan general fortifying his country against us. The child of a Filipina prostitute, on what she was called growing up.

Nobody in these stories is a pundit. That was the point, and it is the same instinct that later became a gold shipping container connecting Tehran and New York.

The full series, by country →

03 · 2008

Race in ’08

Then I turned the same question on my own country and spent a year traveling America, reporting on how race was moving through the election. Text and video, the same way.

Both dispatches →