Michael Paterniti

“At first, you fall in love. You wake in the morning woozy and your twilight is lit with astral violet light. You spelunk down into each other until you come to possess some inner vision of e...”

“Though Mohyeldin's journalistic reputation continues to grow - born in Egypt, raised in Michigan, started as a gofer for NBC News, reared as a producer at CNN, first appeared on-camera for A...”

“In the battle of substance over flash, few to none of the Al Jazeera correspondents are recognizable to U.S. audiences. Many have foreign names and accents; none have best-selling books atop...”

“As it is, Al Jazeera is mostly funded by grants from the emir of Qatar-Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, whose family has ruled the country since the mid-1800s.”

“Albania is located sixty miles across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. It borders Montenegro and Kosovo to the north, Macedonia to the east, and Greece to the south. If you know nothing about 't...”

“The lucky village of Sodeto, in the kingdom of Aragon, is a cluster of sensible houses spackled together off the main road, curtained behind a pine copse.”

“When in my writing lair, I have no access to the Web. Otherwise, I'm like one of those lab rats on too much sugar. To compile my Google searches would be to see my sludgy, allusive brain at...”

“Albanians love topiary and fancy doors. They speak Albanian, an Indo-European language with traces of Greek and Latin - and the lek is their monetary denomination, which trades at one hundre...”

“The older we get, the more we desire to reclaim our body at 25; we'll take our face at 35, the elasticity of our mind at its most powerful, to return ourselves somehow to our most vital mome...”

“As a kid, I watched 'Bugs Bunny' cartoons, and for some reason Pepe Le Pew, the indomitable French skunk pursuing his would-be kitty paramour, left his mark on me: became an instant emblem o...”

“Drake's home is its own fantasia, a single-level ranch that sprawls in various wings over 7,500 square feet, from the game room to the gym to Drake's master bedroom with Jacuzzi. The pool is...”

“The monastery of Christ in the Desert had its resident hermit, Brother Xavier, chosen after years of devotion and service, a monk so trusted and experienced that he qualified by Benedictine...”

“Being partly Italian or, rather, having an Italian last name, I've always dreamed of really becoming partly Italian, of eating piles of mouthwatering fettuccine in the piazza, speaking a lan...”

“'Supercentenarian' is the term used by longevity experts to signify a near numerical impossibility: those who've outpaced 99.9999 percent of the population and landed in the 110+ Club.”

“Storytelling is about patience, about making sense of the moments of pathos and beauty that you find, and about carrying these moments back into your own life.”

“What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewar...”

“Operating from 1975 to 1979, S-21 became the most infamous of 196 such prison camps the Khmer Rouge established throughout Cambodia, primarily because so many of its prisoners were the purge...”

“Ring Kuot, a 15-year-old Sudanese boy, was rumored to be eight feet three. And until Leonid's emergence at eight feet four inches last spring, people generally assumed that Radhouane Charbib...”

“Legend has it that when Franco's troops crushed Catalonia in 1939, relegating it for the next thirty-five years to abuse and neglect, one of his generals was asked what more he could possibl...”

“I first went to Cambodia in 2002, primarily, as it turned out, to change diapers. My wife had work in Phnom Penh, and thus left with her driver and translator early each morning and returned...”