Felicity Barringer never knew Daniel Pearl, “but I was struck by the parallels in our lives,” she says. “We both went from Stanford-based journalism to report from distant places at historic moments.” As a result, says Barringer, whose story about the slain Wall Street Journal reporter begins on page 72, “I wanted to claim kinship. When I saw how many people had the same impulse, I decided to explore why.” Barringer, ’72, started her career at the Stanford Daily and went on to work as a reporter and editor at The Record in Hackensack, N.J., the Washington Post and the New York Times. She joined the Times in 1986, in Moscow, where she covered the beginning of the end of the Cold War, focusing on Soviet dissidents, the Chernobyl disaster and the profound cultural changes of the time. Since 1998, she has been the Times press correspondent, which led her to cover Pearl’s kidnapping and murder in Pakistan. Barringer is married to Phil Taubman, ’70. They have two sons, Michael, ’03, and Gregory, who heads to Princeton this fall.
The dust jacket on the recently published book Freetown Ambush has a picture of a cranial x-ray that shows a pudgy, cylindrical object lodged an inch or two inside the skull. The object is a bullet, and the head is ian stewart’s. Shot while on a reporting assignment in Sierra Leone in 1999, Stewart, now a Knight fellow at Stanford, was airlifted to London and barely survived. He has undergone a slow and agonizing rehabilitation since. He writes about the dangers journalists like Daniel Pearl face, and the importance of their work, on page 74. A Toronto native, Stewart earned his undergraduate degree at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and a master’s in journalism at Columbia. Reporting first for United Press International and later for the Associated Press, he has been posted in Hong Kong, India and Vietnam, in addition to West Africa. In the mid-’90s, based in Islamabad, Pakistan, he reported on the emergence of a radical Islamic government in Afghanistan, backed by Pakistani extremists and financed in part by a shadowy terror leader named Osama bin Laden. Freetown Ambush, Stewart’s account of his experiences reporting in Africa, was published in Canada in February. An American edition will be on shelves this fall.
Seth Affoumado wanted a “warm and fuzzy, loving-couple portrait” when he set out to photograph memory researchers Danielle Lapp and Jerome Yesavage in their campus Eichler home. But “they were hard to shoot together, because their faces and personalities are so different and both of them were tense,” recalls Affoumado, 39, who lives in Daly City with his wife, fine-art photographer Caroline Cory, and their toddler son, Ezra. “I warmed them up by asking Danielle for a house tour and by talking trout and optics with Jerry,” he says. Lapp and Yesavage appear—at ease—on page 66.
