War Reporting Classroom: The Anatomy of Trauma Journalism

This is Mount Lebanon, where massive oaks soar above thousand year old cedars along the Mediterranean coast. The tree-lined mountain range is a witness-cum-survivor of more wars, invasions, occupations and violent incursions than anywhere else during the past millennia. It is here where many of the world’s leading conflict correspondents have reported on the vastly disproportionate turbulence and terror shaping this small nation in the Levant.

ZAPORIZHZHIA! Mother Earth in the Balance

This is Zaporizhzhia, midway along the vast front line where Ukrainians fight to regain their ground. We’ve replaced K/NOW’s customary image with this immersive oil on canvas by Kyiv-based painter Yaroslav Leonets. He depicts what the camera can no longer capture: a lone cyclist in repose, overlooking an undisturbed landscape. The vista, like so many Leonets memorialized, has since been destroyed.

War and Accountability: Ben Ferencz Lives for Justice

This is Ben Ferencz, diminutive in height, soaring in stature among global jurists. No one has worked longer to replace war with the rule of law. No one has done more to hold perpetrators accountable for mass atrocities.

Financing American Hate
This is Sarasota, Florida, a few miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, near the big arena where the local NRA gathered this spring. Longtime residents and newcomers, even veteran researchers know this city of nearly 60,000 to be active, diverse, and divided by age as much as anything else. Oldest of the 3,200 large counties in the United States (demographically it’s 15 years ahead of the nation), Sarasota has a following among data scientists as an indicator of what’s to come.

Feeding the War Machine
This is the Oreo, the world’s most popular cookie that’s fast becoming the symbol of American industry dodging global sanctions on Russia.Turns out the #1 product from America’s favorite confectioner, Chicago-based Mondelez Corp, is also beloved in Moscow. While Putin’s polemical call for enmity toward the US-led West grows stronger, even more powerful is the Russian appetite for that black and white American icon – vanilla cream sandwiched by two chocolate wafers – and Mondelez has no intention of giving up his flagship’s billion dollar market there.

A tyrant, a craven power play and an East-West test

This is Novogrudok in Grodny Province, a rural region running hundreds of square miles along western Belarus. Cross the triangular border and find Lithuania and Poland, former cogs of the Communist wheel, both struggling democracies and North Atlantic Treaty Organization members in the decades since they left the Soviet orbit. The two countries have long focused on Belarus’ Alyaksandr Lukashenko, a Soviet revivalist who put his people in a stranglehold shortly after assuming power in 1994; a thug who’s been an easy reach for benefactor Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’s become more dangerous as he digs into his autocracy, crushing domestic dissent and corroding civil society with fear-based governance.

This is Razia Jan, Afghanistan’s unofficial envoy for girls’ education. Diminutive in size, large in presence, Jan assumes female agency in a culture where men have long prevented it. She’s a gutsy woman who skillfully bends the rigidity of the local village elders, an activist who has spawned an entire first generation of educated women in areas just outside Afghanistan’s capital. Celebrated worldwide for offering opportunity to girls in the poor villages of Deh’Subz, her Zabuli Education Center near Kabul turns out high school graduates, certified midwives and newly-equipped teachers who go right to work in the community.

Mental Distress Meets Deadly Opioids

This is mid-afternoon Baltimore, but it could be Anywhere, USA. The scene is so familiar, so disturbing, public eyes adjust to avert it. This is opioid overdose, and with 100 million-plus users in the United States, it happens every hour of every day. 2020’s toxicity -- the pandemic, the polarizing politics, the racism, the financial hardship -- pushed people beyond their pain limits, sending overdose rates to record highs.

COVID’s savage impact and what communities can do

This is Darin Mayo wrapping up an eight-hour day at Fresh Start, where troubled Baltimore teens stop in their tracks. Among boys and girls who’ve committed misdemeanors, even felonies, he’s one of thousands the city remands each year to work camps, rehab centers, and places like this nine-month carpentry workshop, where daily GED prep mixes with measuring, sawing, and assembling.

Desperate for Human Capital to Fix what Government Doesn’t

Giving up on government, Puerto Rican citizens rebuild society with the bare minimum, including the population. COVID-19 stopped youth and jobseekers moving to the US in their tracks. Islanders need their talent to stay and become part of the change.

Crushing Challenges 

This is eighteen-year-old Denic Tafoya, standing proud after parading through large summer crowds in Santa Fe.

Urbanized and Abandoned

This is Amman, one of the city’s many rambling and decrepit areas where poor Jordanians share space with millions of other indigent residents. There are the Palestinians who fled Israel, the Iraqis and Syrians who poured in from wars next door, the Africans drawn by Jordan’s open door to refugees.

Costs Crush World’s #1 Host

This is Beirut, with its ever-alluring coastline and deep-water ports. Once the Middle East mecca for travelers and traders, the Mediterranean city now leads Lebanon’s campaign to shake off a more recent reputation as war-beaten and high-risk. 

Pushing Hard Against Cultural Norms

This is Rana Ersar, boldly confronting sexual violence in the burgeoning Muslim refugee communities of Amman. This is what Arab leadership looks like, rising from families, entire countries ravaged by war.

Rage and Repeat

This is Kongolote Refugee Camp, a few miles from Mozambique’s capital of Maputo, and a few months after a cyclone struck with its savage rains. Nature’s wrath is familiar to this African country; it wreaks havoc here every couple of years.

Who Will Northern Ireland Become?

This is Giant’s Causeway, miles of hexagon-shaped volcanic rock jutting from Northern Ireland far into the Atlantic.

Big Problems for Small Towns  

This is Lake Worth, Florida, a short bridge across the Intercoastal Waterway but a world apart from glistening Palm Beach.

It's Epidemic and Corrosive

This is Salt Lake City, a socially conservative town where public expressions of hate are usually on mute. So, when a sandwich-boarded zealot angered a young woman crossing the street, she quickly returned toting her response.

Islamic State of West Africa Province Strangles Region

This is Toge, an aging and sprawling shantytown just off the highway near Nigeria’s modern capital, Abuja. It’s dusty and hot, a sweltering swirl of humanity isolated from the gleaming metropolis.

Reluctant Host to Migrants

This is Valparaíso, midpoint up the mountain where poverty climbs the rest of the way.