Category: People

Off the Derech

BY JEFFREY BERMAN I walked into his Bushwick duplex a little earlier than most of the other guests. My host apologized that everyone was running late. Still, he said, hopefully we would start soon. I wasn’t offered a drink on…

El Parche: Art to Change Colombia

BY STIG ARILD PETTERSEN The smiling face of a tanned young woman with short black hair suddenly peeps out of the apartment door next to the bell I’ve just rung. She’s Olga and I’m Stig and we’re both happy to…

Exiled From Iran

BY JEFFREY BERMAN Behzad Yaghmaian, an Iranian author and economist living in New York City, last visited Iran in 1998. Unlike previous trips home, this time Yaghmaian knew this time that returning to Iran again would be difficult, perhaps impossible.…

An Accidental Career Helping in Chechnya

BY MATTHEW LUCAS Gistam Sakaeva’s career in humanitarian work began, in 1995, “by accident” in the refugee camps of Dagestan during the First Chechen War. Sakaeva, an unassuming single mother of two young children, is a Chechen humanitarian aid worker…

From Beirut to Beer

BY WHITNEY EULICH One month before the birth of his first child, Steve Hindy was kidnapped by the Southern Lebanon Army (SLA). He was an Associated Press foreign correspondent covering an Irish battalion of UN Peacekeeping forces.  This was the…

Jam and Famine

BY WHITNEY EULICH Moodie was 12 years old, when Germany invaded France. As World War II engulfed Europe, her father sent Moodie and her three sisters and mother to live in the family’s summer home in Chamonix, near the Swiss…

He Walks the Line

In a city of fat cats and streetwise Area Boys, Lagos journalist Kirk Leigh performs a professional balancing act. Lagos, Nigeria—Lagos is famous for its Area Boys. They are not boys at all, but actually young men from the masses…