2004 Daniel Pearl Internship Essay

Last summer, as an intern in the Culture section of U.S. News & World Report, I wrote about Persian novelists, a teenage screenplay writer and the man who invented the deep-fried Twinkie. But I first pitched an article on soccer fans that went to multiplex screenings of sporting events.

"Soccer fans?" asked another intern, puzzled. "Do they really have their own culture?"

"Sure," I said. "It's not so black and white." So to speak.

Daniel Pearl knew this. He traveled the world and told the stories of ordinary people. Other journalists might associate culture with ethnicity. But Pearl's stories seemed to understand that culture went deeper than skin color--there was the world of beauty pageant contestants in Jonesboro, Georgia; pharmacists in Bombay, India; carpet weavers in Ben, Iran.

Storytelling is a trait I inherit from my grandmother, wise with experience, who smelled of saffron and fabric softener. She occupied idle time in Fresno, California by describing her life in Iran. At first, I could only pick up a few words. But as I became more fluent in Farsi, I discovered that her most vivid stories were about people: the hungry beggar who lay with his mouth open under apple trees, the mother who rescued her son from a kitchen fire.

This was the lesson I carried with me as a journalist, writing about a family of plumbers in Menlo Park or a cop who assembled car seats on his days off. But after reading Pearl's stories, I realized that the best journalists don't just find people to write about--they submerge themselves in the culture of the people they write about. Only then, can real stories be told.

After I pitched a story last summer about extravagant Halloween decorations, I knew the true hook wasn't the decorations at all: It was the people who turned their homes into haunted mausoleums. I spent two hours on the phone with a man from Wichita, Kansas, and asked him to walk through his house and describe, in great detail, what he saw. I cared about his culture--the whole picture, not just bits and pieces.

When I think about my future as a journalist, I think about Daniel Pearl--and all that he was able to accomplish with his life and death. He wasn't just a brilliant writer, but a sympathetic human being, who, as Daniel's father Judea eulogized, talked to "strangers in jazz bars, on soccer fields, in barbershops and in train stations." He knew that there was value in ordinary people's stories.

If selected as intern at the Journal, I'd be honored to follow in his footsteps.