First Person RSS
Tue, 18 Sep 2007
Unshackled
Why one reporter left a newspaper to write books
By Posted at 09:00 AM Comments (2)
When I left a reporting job at The Washington Post several years ago, I lost an institution I loved—not to mention free LexisNexis and an affiliation that pretty much guaranteed that my phone calls were returned right away. But I gained the opportunity to immerse myself in a project that I’m sure could never have been created for the... Read More
Mon, 1 Jan 2007
The Communist Way
Vietnam: the subtleties of censorship
By Posted at 08:30 AM
I was accustomed to being censored as an editor, but not as a writer. It pained me that Lam was the one to do it.
Lam was a senior editor at the Vietnam Investment Review, the most liberal paper in Vietnam’s media world, which is entirely government-controlled. In a year and a half as an editor in Hanoi,... Read More
Ode to the Author's Query
They fueled her childhood dreams; now they’re vanishing.
By Posted at 08:30 AM
It was tiny, the slightest piece of prose ever published under my name. If you were nearsighted or preoccupied, you might easily have missed it. It probably went unnoticed by many readers of The New York Times Book Review when it appeared, at the foot of page twelve, on March 14, 2004, under the heading “Author’s Query.” What followed... Read More
