My goal was to be a network correspondent by the time I was 30.
It was Queen Elizabeth who made me a foreign correspondent.
And since I just turned 32, I'm thinking about getting married, having a family, and that's very difficult to do on the road as a correspondent.
We imagined that the mildness of our government and the wishes of the people were so correspondent that we were not as other nations, requiring brutal force to support the laws.
I work for a big newspaper, and I guess I'm an insider. I don't have the luxury of calling myself a foreign correspondent and just swooping in and then leaving.
When I first signed up for a Twitter account - I was to say it was in 2007, people are going to think it's some weird self promotional thing or it's going, but in time I was called upon to like try to persuade other foreign correspondents and journalists to get on Twitter and see the usefulness of it which is kind of ironic. I think the journalists who are leading the digital charge at the Times have, all have that background as a foreign correspondent, which I think is not accidental.
Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of.
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now. " "Then put it on hold. " This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
I speak "with absolute certainty" only so far as my own personal belief is concerned. Those who have not the same warrant for their belief as I have, would be very credulous and foolish to accept it on blind faith. Nor does the writer believe any more than her correspondent and his friends in any "authority" let alone "divine revelation"!
I remember that during the period leading up to independence in Angola in 1975, I was the only correspondent there at all for three months.
The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.
I will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently.
'Acting as if. . . ' I decided, ridiculously in retrospect, that my experience covering women's volleyball for my college newspaper was sufficient for me to at least try to become a war correspondent.
Roaming the world as a foreign correspondent for more than a decade, I was able to observe how a variety of vastly different nations organized themselves economically. The inescapable conclusion was that no politician anywhere on the planet has ever actually created a rupee's worth of prosperity.
Your humble correspondent realizes that many readers are left-wing, anti-string-theory fighters. So they probably smoke marijuana and this is my modest attempt to help them.
Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.
A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: "You don't seem smart enough to be so good at what you're doing. Do you have an explanation?"
I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe.
I think, in a way, I've returned to who I used to be as a global correspondent whose life was devoted to really making a difference, illuminating what's happening in the world, always drawn toward the suffering of peoples and cultures and exposing exploitation and injustice; but now I'm the same person in a much, much softer iteration.
Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by correspondent actions, as the habit of walking, by walking; of running, by running.
