The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

I always like the idea of doing interviews with somebody but completely seriously not ever mentioning what that person is generally known for.

When you're in your twenties in a new city where no one's from here, we're all sort of orphans. The only people that you can count on our bunch of people that you work with and that you know. You're only as good as the reliability of that latticework.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.

The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.