What I Didn’t Say

"I have a recording from the night I walked a street in central Tunis almost thirteen years ago. It is a few minutes long—a mess of car horns and people chanting in Arabic, a language I don’t speak. The date is October 20, 2011, and the people are celebrating the death of Muammar Gaddafi, who ruled Libya from 1969 until he was assassinated that morning."

“Believe me, I never wanted to go to Masala Chaat House. I passed it every day, a cramped one-room restaurant sandwiched between two printing shops on Kampala's bustling Nasser Road.”

“In 2017, I visited Fukushima on a travel grant from Columbia University’s MFA program to research why, six years after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami ravaged the eastern coast of Japan, 35,000 individuals continued to live in temporary housing. The small, prefabricated houses spread across the greater Fukushima Prefecture were quickly deteriorating. Tens of thousands of Japanese were in limbo, news sources insisted.”

“I was born into Christianity as I was born into America. In my childhood, there was the church and the diaspora, and I could not imagine one without the other.”

“This was the backstage, the green room, the wizard’s booth behind the curtain.”

“You’re gonna ask me that before I have sex?!” she joked. I agree that, yes, the timing was shit and we could totally skip it. But she graciously answered.”

“You see, Lagos always had a goal—to become a megacity, a world class city, a modern metropolis that Nigerians could feel proud to call home. But this dream comes at a cost.”

“He worked summers along the Riviera as a tour guide, he told me, mostly for ‘rich assholes’ but sometimes for ‘nice Russian women.’ These were the two categories into which he put most of the world’s population and I think it struck him as refreshing, if not downright serendipitous, that I didn’t fit neatly into either one.”

“The lunar-like landscape of Wadi Rum stretches out before me—at once, alluring and overwhelming in its enormity. I am an insignificant speck, not unlike the grains of sand beneath my bare feet.”

“I come with a background where I'm not a shocked or as naive about why the president is doing any of this and the impact that it has and how it resonates with his base, and why he presses on the caravan issue for example. It just doesn't surprise me that he's using what's happening at the border for his own political advantage. It works because we've seen it work time and time again in Arizona.”

“Latvia’s first LGBT Pride march in 2006 had been violently attacked by a mob armed with human feces and holy water, placing the country on Amnesty International’s Human Rights Watch list.”

“He still had an enviable crop of hair and beard, now gray and relatively kempt, and though his skin was doughy and shadow-less his eyes were as soft and expressive as a pig's. As he sat at a visitation table in clean blue chambray, he looked less like America's most dangerous criminal and more like the original Maytag Man, waiting fist-to-cheek.”

“There was an entire system in place that revolved around disposal. It was an act of letting go that was deliberate and methodical, an active and almost festive act of losing, antithetical to how I functioned as a person.”

“I walk down Portobello Road, past the bright blue, red, and yellow facades of buildings that I have no desire to enter, past glossy, small boutiques filled with narrow-hipped women…I’m wearing clean scrubs, clogs. A foreigner. Refugee from a hospital, wanting to preserve my other life, the person I was before the sacrifices of this long training.”

“There’s also a strange phenomenon many people have noted, and the motive for retranslating any work, and that is that the translation dates while the original doesn’t.”

“The essence of design is just to express who you are, or express a view you have of the world. For me, it’s also about the sense for craftsmanship.”

“With such a tenuous relationship to our stories, how can the media demand our trust? How can they demand to tell our stories?”

“I was sure that if I threw myself at the sports world when it was at its best I would hit something worthwhile.”

“Irmela Mensah-Schramm started removing hate graffiti one day in 1986. As of 2016, she had removed or altered more than 70,000 stickers or pieces of graffiti.”

“When he got back to Vietnam he knew they’d lose the war because none of the US soldiers wanted to be there. They smoked marijuana in their barracks at night, he said, listened to rock music and read letters from home, sobbing aloud.”

“We laid on a slab of sandstone and watched the moon and listened to the water trickle over red rock glazed moonlight-blue.”

“From 2011 to 2016 Fabio Bucciarelli photographed the plight of refugees fleeing the uprisings of the "Arab Spring." During that time, he began work on his long-term project, "The Dream."“

“The whole history of television is executives saying, "No, that female character is too unlikeable, that female character is too obnoxious, that female character no one’s going to relate to. That female character is not sexy enough, is too chubby, is too...”

“We had seen fire, and we had seen rain. We had seen some of the worst desperation the country had to offer, but also the friendliness and kindness that marks so many encounters in the Dominican.”

“The way this presidency moves, it’s sort of like a pinball machine, bouncing from issue to issue with amazing velocity. You sometimes find yourself on the same day writing about North Korea, nuclear weapons on the one hand, and the opioid crisis on the other, and some sort of big personnel shuffle at the same time.”

“There were times when Sean Spicer would call me and yell at me. Now in hindsight, I learned from that experience that I should never let anyone scream at me off the record. That shouldn’t be allowed.”

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I’ll be doing it for the next 20 years....this is a historic moment, whether you like it or not. It’s good to be able to say that you’re one of the questioners of an American President...”

“I apparently have an endless capacity to be obsessed with subjects. I’m obsessed with Trump right now. From just what he was trying to express when he took to Twitter shortly after midnight one night and wrote “Covfefe”...[to] how he’s making decisions on how to handle the crisis in North Korea, I find my beat fascinating.”

“And so, after having flown for a day, driven for three days, we now rode reindeer for three days in the dead of winter over moonscapes, and arrived in this place which was some hybrid of Mordor and Lord of the Flies. Reindeer bounded right up to us, like we’d just arrived at Santa’s workshop.”