I like to think that as I get older I'm getting better at spending time with people who have qualities that make them worth spending time with.

As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.

If you represent everyone, in some ways you represent no one. You're un-owned.

I was working in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, and I banged on the door and said, "I'm ready to go." And they said, "What's your combat experience?" I said, "Does my parents' divorce count? It was pretty rough." Then they said, "What's your reporting experience?" And I said, "I covered the women's volleyball team in college exceptionally well." The guy was like, "You are so not ready to be a war correspondent."

When I wake up in the middle of the night when I hear one of my kids coughing or crying, I think about Syria.

When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in the hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.

My second epiphany came as an intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The man I worked for was consumed with what was going on in Bosnia. And the more I knew [about it] the more saddened I was. There were these images of emaciated men behind barbed wire.... It was like, I've got to find a way to do something.