The biggest challenge I have found in writing a profile is not so much finding a character as finding a “so what.” I’m in journalism because I think people everywhere are very interesting; most people, given enough poking and prodding, will yield sufficiently compelling life stories or internal contradictions that you would be able to regurgitate in, say, a dinner party setting. Follow someone around for a little bit and sprinkle richly written details about their life — how they drink their coffee, how they do their nails, how they move about in the world — and you appear to have a character.

How do you convince a reader that this person deserves a story of their own? You could try to connect their story to a broader narrative, as Deb and Hessler do. But this also has limitations, especially where the market of stories is saturated. I could, for example, go profile a tech CEO and describe breathlessly how they wake up really early in the morning, are always on their phone, and terrorize/encourage/manage their dedicated employees in a messy startup house in San Francisco. This could be interesting writing, but “Tech CEO works hard and wants to build a crazy product” is not a novel thing. Sometimes, a new angle just isn’t there.

I also think one thing that the Ragan and Nieman guides missed is the importance of interviews with people that are not the subject of the profile. They can provide important color and balance against whatever picture of themselves the subject is trying to paint to you. I recently reread Patrick Radden Keefe’s fantastic profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, which rests heavily on interviews with other movers and shakers in the art world about Gagosian’s career. While Radden Keefe does get significant interview time with his subject, which is revealing in its own right, his most interesting insights come from other people who have observed Gagosian for years. I suppose whether or not you’re able to do this depends on your subject. Deb’s nightclub girls and Hessler’s trash people are not people of renown, and their own authorial observations provide more than enough framing and commentary to draw out the story for the reader.

But I think one thing that’s easy to slip into in a profile — you see a lot of this in sports writing — is excessive deference to the subject. This happens for totally understandable reasons. You might feel a certain amount of gratitude to a subject that takes time to talk to you and invites you into your home, especially if they’re not a person of means. You are definitionally invested in hearing their story in full detail. But some of the best profiles are adversarial — perhaps so much so that the writer can’t get an interview with the subject. I think of NYMag’s profile of John Fetterman in May, which laid out the senator’s mental health struggles in devastating detail, or The Atlantic’s study in April of Trump 2.0. Both subjects did not give a fully honest retelling of their story.

I have always been a bit daunted by the prospect of the profile. How do you capture a whole human being in one piece and serve them up to the world to read? It is less a fear of offending the individual in question, or failing to accurately represent them, which is no different from any kind of reporting we do. But there is something about conveying the life of an individual human that feels very delicate. I also struggle with relevance — when you’re dealing with a person, or event, rather than a widespread phenomenon, how do you get your readers to care about your subject like someone they know? Novelists do it all the time, but it feels harder in journalism, where there’s no room for making things up. 

In both Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” and Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives,” though, people and places were fully alive and relevant and interesting at all times. Part of the advantage of writing for a Western audience about elements of Egyptian culture and Syrian nightlife is that everything is novel, so simple sensory descriptions go a long way. The first for grafs of “Dancing for Their Lives” are almost purely descriptive, entirely devoid of quotes. This is often a journalism no-no, but here it really works for both introducing Um Nour as a character and the nightclub as a space. For an unfamiliar audience, the story is merely that such a person and such a place exist, and we want to understand it. 

Hessler employs a similar strategy. To understand the informal economy of the zabalen, for someone who hasn’t directly experienced it, is to be transported into a new world with unfamiliar practices and rules. The story stays interesting through physical description and the introduction of a central character. Both Deb and Hessler see many different sides of Um Nour and Sayyid, respectively. Both journalists are introduced to a new system — the system of prostitution in Syrian nightclubs, and the system of garbage pickup in Cairo — through these central characters. In some ways, they are the tour guides to their own profiles, and we only see of their lives what they show us. 

The journalist’s role then becomes to reflect on these lives in all their richness and activity, draw out significant themes (as the two Nieman and WSJ advice pieces advised), and organize them. In “Dancing for Our Lives,” the image of the women “lingering together in this comfortable female place, homesick, preparing to live off their bodies,” accomplishes this particularly well. This is the thesis in a nutshell: the women in the piece are dancing, literally, for their lives. Any outside could understand that. But only the insider, who has entered the changing room with these women and watched them prepare, could get a sense of the comfort in the shared female space, or accurately convey the homesickness of these women. Similarly, in “What the garbage man knows,” Hessler gives us insight only he, as a journalist who has truly immersed, could provide. He has gone to Sayyid’s house, gone to court with him. There was something unsatisfying in being unable to piece together what happened with Sayyid and Wahiba’s marriage. But Hessler gets us the closest a person can get. Reading these pieces helped me work through the role of a profile. There are so many people in the world the average person never gets to be close with, from politicians to celebrities sex workers to the local garbage collector — and a profile’s job is to get us the closest we can get.

Both pieces this week, Amos’ Dancing for Their Lives and Hessler’s Tales of the Trash, use an immersive style of reporting to transport readers into the lives of their subjects. Whether in a crowded women’s bathroom as Iraqi women prepare to find customers within an underground prostitution ring or accompanying trash collector Sayyid Ahmed on his daily rounds. As journalists immerse themselves within the lives of their subjects, second-hand recollection is replaced by first-person experience, getting readers closer to the actual lives of the subjects. I believe that this first-person narrative brings profiles alive and is the type of reporting I hope to emulate. 

I also found the focus of these pieces to be especially fascinating. Both of these articles differently explore the nuanced power of female sexuality. A tool for survival amidst debilitating social and economic repression, yes, but also as a unique mark of shame. Amos describes young female Iraqi refugees in Syria who use prostitution as a way to support their own lives and those of their families. Yet, this means of survival holds its own immense risks, especially as honor killings of accused prostitutes throughout the early years of the twenty-first century served as a message to those engaging in this illegal channel of income. Syrian benefactors were ultimately the winners in this market – Syrian club owners were paid steep cover fees by male Iraqi patrons and by the women who left the club each night with a male companion. In this case, female sexuality was not only criminalized and seen as a mark of shame for those whom it employed, yet was also commodified by the very men who stigmatized its use. While this is by no means a novel concept, its global and long-lasting endurance, as well as the specific tie it has to migrant communities in Syria, was exemplified in this reporting.  

In Hessler’s piece, the sexuality of men is glorified and commodified – in this case through the sale of sexual performance-enhancing drugs pervasive in Ahmed’s community. However, this is juxtaposed with the circumcision and genital mutilation of women, a physical representation of the forceful repression and discouragement of female sexuality. These innate contradictions point to the larger gendered disconnect within the society Hessler is reporting on. 

In commenting on these themes, both of these pieces also use the profile format to comment on the larger issues plaguing the communities their subjects interact with. I think this is a crucial aspect of profiles that increase their relevance and poignancy.

The readings this week helped show me just how much work goes into finding a character. As Kim Cross mentions in her article on the art of the narrative interview, it is just as important to watch as it is to listen. When asking questions, it is not just about figuring out what happened, but also how it felt and what it meant to the person you are interviewing. I took this advice to heart given the fact that I will be writing a profile in the coming days. The information provided on narrative interviewing across the readings made it clear that strong stories are crafted from the emotional truth a person is able to provide. Cross breaks this down even further when she mentions that stories like these rely on a central conflict or tension that helps shape the arc of the story.

This advice became much easier to follow when I read Peter Hessler’s “What the Garbage Man Knows.” Suddenly the lessons outlined in the other readings came to life. Hessler’s narrative centers around just one trash collector, whose daily routine helps the author explore themes such as community, class, and even women’s rights. The garbage collector, Sayyid, is illiterate, but through Hessler’s storytelling readers are able to see just how important he is in his community. Sayyid’s observations become the central focus of the piece, and his life’s story becomes more than just experiences.

What made Hessler’s approach so interesting to me was the restraint and poise he used in his writing. When writing about a person or subject one doesn’t know much about, it’s easy to inject one’s own beliefs. Hessler, however, never romanticizes Sayyid’s life, nor does he craft a narrative that forces the audience to pity him. Hessler simply lets Sayyid’s experiences, truth, and stories shape the article he is writing. It is only through this format that readers are able to look through Sayyid’s eyes and see the complexities of life in Cairo. Hessler is also careful to never impose any meaning onto what he is finding out. Instead, Hessler lets Sayyid speak through his actions throughout the piece.

Similarly, Deborah Amos’s “Dancing for Their Lives” helps echo Hessler’s story in that both journalists utilize empathy and integrity to uncover humanity in places that are less accessible to the general public. Amos writes about young Iraqis who continue to dance amid tension in the region. Amos, however, refuses to make the subjects of her story symbols of something they are not. Amos makes sure to instead authentically portray the stories of those in front of her and lets readers come to their own conclusions. Her story comes to life because of her use of sensory and descriptive details. Readers are essentially transported into the nightclub she is referring to. Additionally, by using a setting (both a building and a country), Amos was able to express ideas and emotions that dialogue alone would not be able to.

Collectively, both pieces helped me understand much more about what it takes to write a compelling narrative piece that speaks to readers.  By writing on the daily lives of individuals, the journalists were able to inform and interest readers at the same time.

The readings for this week included examples of powerful first person narratives, combining the personal experience of the author interacting with other characters to tell a story about culture. Both Peter Hessler and Deborah Amos’s stories were discussions of activities occurring due to circumstances specific to their location.

Hessler’s article discussing the trash collection process in Cairo not only explained why the system operates within the informal economy, but showed a snapshot of cultural beliefs through the garbage collector Sayyid. This article I find particularly powerful because the reader is let into Hessler’s world, as we move chronologically through his experiences with Sayyid. An article discussing statistics about religious practices, divorce rates, or drug problems in Cairo would not be able to show the interaction of these three elements within the society, much less convey a convincing narrative about the realities of life. It is helpful to tell this story through Hessler’s perspective also because it allows us to have interiority with Sayyid. Excluding the first person element could have made the story less convincing if it claimed to know a great deal about Sayyid without telling the reader how a relationship between him and Hessler was built before that information was shared. 

Similarly, Amos’s story describes a nightclub scene in the first person voice. As the reader, understanding how Amos was able to enter the club gave the story a greater legitimacy, as it is clear that the actions of other characters was not preformative. Readers are then able to gain access to areas like the women’s restroom, understanding the pretenses under which the information is being gained. When Amos is describing her uneasy feelings, the reader can also better picture the scene in the nightclub and its atmosphere. With an article like this where the author is posing to be someone they are not, I wonder about the ethical limits for the information they can include, even if it is from the first person perspective. When a source is giving quotes, we are able to use whatever they said since it is attributed, and I am curious if that rule also applies for an author writing in first person.

I found some of the tips mentioned in the article about interviewing particularly useful. Especially in long-form writing, I understand the importance of cultivating a relationship with an interviewee, and making sure they see you as more than a robot reporter. I liked the tip about asking to meet in the source’s house, since you are given an opportunity to see parts of their life in pictures on the walls and have a greater sense of their lived experiences. I would also agree with the point that, once a main character is found, the story practically writes itself.

Never did I think I could learn so much about the intricacies of Egyptian society and culture through the story of one of its garbage collectors. Sayyid Ahmed’s story in Tales of the Trash starts off with an amalgamation of unassuming interactions between him and journalist Peter Hessler. Each week, trash collector (or ‘zabaleen’) Sayyid makes visits to Hessler’s home, dissipating his trash from existence from the fire escape beside his front door before the break of dawn.

Sayyid is illustrated as an eccentric and illiterate middle-aged man existing in one of the most fascinating informal city infrastructures I’ve ever encountered. As an uncontracted garbage collector, Sayyid is not paid by any government or private organization; he operates mainly on tips. And yet, he brings in more than $500USD monthly to his family, more than twice the average monthly earnings in Cairo. While his illiteracy forces him to ask his neighbors to read out messages from his wife or labels on counterfeit sex drugs (Sayyid’s striking fixation on women and sex, as the piece offers a deep dive into, reveals a swath of insights on Egyptian culture), Sayyid’s attunement to his physical presentation and his surroundings is apparent. He dresses very poorly, for example, because he knows that residents are more likely to tip the more destitute he appears. In a kind of strange semblance to OSINT, Sayyid uses the trash he collects from residents to make inferences about their lives: the regular appearance of two syringes a day in one resident’s home, for example, implied that he had diabetes; discarded bank letters and pornographic magazines from an elderly sex-crazed diplomat revealed his wealth and sexual preferences in detail.

I was fascinated by how Hessler structured the story in such a way that Sayyid’s story bridged to larger insights about Egyptian culture and history. The zabaleen system, for example, emerged from a wave of migration of Copic Christians in the 30s who sold pork and became contracted waste recyclers. In the late 2000s, however, political unrest destabilized the system, in part contributing to the excess of trash that became highly visible in the city. Hessler in many ways accomplished what I want to do in my own profile, situating the story of one man’s life in the wider context of the political, historical, and social shfits that shaped the personal lives of its residents. In ephemeral bursts of scenes and conversations he has with Sayyid, Hessler wove together a story not just of one person but an entire nation. I would love to combine this kind of ‘interwoven’ storytelling with the striking visuality and description used in Deb’s piece. Each scene was described with so much life and color — her writing allowed me to vividly see the image of the dance floor or the faces of the women. The almost mystical description of the scene sharply contrasted with the dark destitution faced by the women and children, forced into prostitution to support themselves and their family. With the combination of vivid storytelling and politico-historical contextualization, I hope to write about Hesham’s story of escape from the Syrian war with vivid and honest detail.

Hessler’s piece was as much a snapshot of Cairo’s political and social systems as it was a profile of one man’s place within those systems. He managed to weave a compelling and at times alarming personal narrative of Sayyid Ahmed into a much larger tapestry, without letting that tapestry swallow up Ahmed’s story. Through exploring the astoundingly complex informal economy of waste disposal replete made up of subcontracts all the way down, we see the deficiencies in Egypt’s public sector, the cultural beliefs around the trade in sex drugs, and the religious and political turns of events that influenced the evolution of organic waste disposal; through Ahmed’s relationship with his wife, we see an oppressive patriarchal society at work. Indeed, the scene between Ahmed and the lawyer he consulted demonstrated the inner workings with uncomfortable detail, as the lawyer seeks to ensnare Ahmed by appealing to his masculinity, attacking Wahiba with exceedingly derogatory and violent language, and exuberantly showing Ahmed how he can ruin his wife’s life in a ploy to bring her back. I was particularly struck by how Hessler initially portrays Ahmed as a rather sympathetic, “friendly guy-in-the-street,” but as we continue to read the piece, we begin to see him as a much more complicated character, exposed to and complicit in misogynist ideology in a way that was difficult to read at times. Hessler makes us reassess Ahmed constantly throughout the piece; he was so effective in doing so that by the end of the piece I instinctively began to ask why Hessler would still drink and chat with him. 

Part of what makes this tapestry so effective is Hessler’s subtle transitions between the local and global, which often come without one noticing but can also serve several purposes at once when conveyed in a more active manner. For example, I thought the transition from his account of the killing of disposal pigs, followed by the sentence “For Sayyid, none of this—the people of the oasis, the wandering pig-raisers, the Exodus-style slaughter carried out by a dying regime—is exotic or unusual,” was effective because it brought us back to Ahmed, gave us a summary of the national political story with flair, and also allowed the reader to adopt a more Ahmed-esque perspective on that national story by describing it in an over-the-top, perhaps almost Orientalist, tone. Finally, the sheer amount of detail that Hessler could stuff into the piece made the whole thing more memorable. Details we glimpse early in the piece come back as kickers later on, like when we learn that zabaleen protested the slaughter of pigs by leaving organic waste uncollected, and then we travel to a lawyer’s office in a building surrounded by said organic waste. The repetition and interpolation makes the profile stick in one’s head.

Hessler used the authority he generated from these narrative techniques to conclude with an argument about Egypt as a whole: Ahmed’s eventual return to his wife parallels Egypt’s tendency to go through a revolution and emerge where it started. This kind of extrapolation in a profile is audacious. Yet Hessler pulls it off, thanks to the months he spent following the garbage man.

I approached the readings for this week more methodologically as I’m thinking about how to structure my own profile. I’m planning to write about Ivan, a Russian activist and writer now living in Berlin after a troubled personal journey that in many ways hunts him to this day. Both Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives” and Peter Hessler’s “What the Garbageman Knows” helped me think about how to write about someone’s everyday life without overexplaining it. They approach people in very different ways: Deb through immersion, Hessler through close observation and patience. Both methods feel relevant as I figure out how to approach Ivan’s story. I think the biggest challenge is to understand how to portray the suffering in his story without “dumping” all of his trauma onto the page, but still acknowledging and dignifying it.

Deb’s piece works through proximity. She brings the reader into the Damascus nightclub without preface—the smoke, sequins, and noise come first, and the politics stay in the background. What stood out to me is how she doesn’t frame the women as “subjects” or “issues.” Their personalities come through in details: how they fix their makeup, trade photos of their children, and walk into the club like they’re stepping into another life. The writing feels respectful but unsentimental. Deb lets us understand their choices through the rhythm of the night, there is no commentary. For Ivan, I want to follow that same approach. He has this mix of irony and vulnerability that I think works best when shown in small moments, like when he jokes that literature is “a parasite that can eat all your time.”

Hessler’s piece is more methodical. He builds Sayyid’s world slowly, through repetition and return, but always adding something new that helps us to frame him. His writing feels steadier, almost invisible. While Deb’s story unfolds over a single night, Hessler’s happens over months of small interactions. He shows how a person can be both ordinary and essential: Sayyid isn’t described as a symbol of resilience, but by the end, we understand how much he holds the city together. That kind of patience is something I’d like to borrow for Ivan’s profile. His thoughts about exile, writing, and activism accumulated naturally during our conversation, they were not forced into a single theme, and I hope to convey this.

The main difference, I think, is that Deb writes from the inside out, while Hessler writes from the outside in, noticing the patterns around someone until a fuller picture appears. I can see both sides applying to Ivan: he’s introspective and articulate (which invites that closer, inside view), but his life also reflects a broader story of displacement and adaptation that could be shown through his surroundings.

Both readings reminded me that profiles don’t have to be dramatic or conclusive. They can just sit with a person’s contradictions—like Deb’s dancers balancing survival and dignity, or Hessler’s garbageman finding structure in chaos. For Ivan, that contradiction might be between his old identity as an activist and his new one as a writer, and I hope to write in a way that makes space for both.

By Devon Rudolph

What happens if my reporting goes unheard? This question has consumed my thoughts since our workshop with Gavin Rees, an advisor for the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma. He said that one sign of resilience in crisis reporting is a high sense of meaning in one’s work. For reporters who cover issues they find important to the functioning of society, their work holds strong meaning. Yet, it is possible to publish a story that has no societal impact. Maintaining our fundamental values when others dismiss our contributions, we discussed with Rees, is an integral element of remaining sane in the fraught profession of journalism.

Rees also compared journalists covering breaking news to doctors in an emergency room. When a catastrophe occurs, they drop everything to rush to the scene. An orderly day in the life of a journalist may quickly devolve when more pressing matters arise. It is clear from this metaphor that reporters cannot always put themselves first, and often don’t have control over their daily activities. When combined with the difficulties of reporting on a traumatic topic, journalists are exposed to stress that requires self assessment. As Rees explained, this doesn’t require an immediate withdrawal at the first sign of mental distress, but rather a recognition that everyone has limits.

Later in the day, our class had a quite different conversation with Kristin Brinker, a member of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party. The focus of our course is migration, so we asked about the AfD’s anti-immigration platform. Brinker distinguished between Ukrainian and Syrian immigrants, implying that Germany welcomed Ukrainians because they accepted its “culture.” When further pressed about what it means to be German, Brinker emphasized religion, specifically “Christian Jewish.” Similar to the far-right MAGA movement, she tied religion to policy. Brinker also claimed that pro-Palestine protests are anti-German, considering the country’s history with Israel and the Holocaust. 

At the end of this day, we shared dinner and conversation with students from the Technical University of Berlin. I talked with two students about our class journalism project in Germany, which led to a discussion about the core principles of journalism. They asked: what is journalism, and how is it different from tik-tok videos? Since the umbrella for what ‘counts’ as journalism can be so broad, I defended the position that principled reporters derive their core values from fact and truth. Influencers don’t have the same moral responsibility to ensure their reporting is informed by facts. Journalists seeking to find truths must do their best to make a bullet-proof, fact-based narrative, citing sources, quoting trustworthy facts, and reporting oppositional beliefs. This type of reporting not only holds greater authority, but it just may have the potential to change minds.

By Luqmaan Bamba

Balance of memory. The politics of remembrance. The singularity of nazism.

These were my novel takeaways from this afternoon’s tour of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg. 

On the balance of memory 

Our guide noted that this camp imprisoned and killed Jews, but in the early days of the camp the focus was political dissidents, including communists and anti-Nazi activists. Another challenge of remembering came after the camp was liberated, when it fell under Soviet control and they began targeting anti-Soviet dissidents. In the 1960s, when memorialization started, there was tension among survivors. Which victims should be recognized? To whom should the center be dedicated? If multiple victims are recognized, then to what degree and in what fashion should each be memorialized? The layperson thinking about mid-20th-century events doesn’t typically think about how society grapples with its past. Before this tour, I was included among these people.  

On the politics of remembrance 

One case in point: a police academy on the grounds of sites where the police once collaborated with the Gestapo. The memorial center wanted to narrow its focus to prisoners and manage its priorities and impact. In the 1990s, some of the land surrounding the memorial was handed over to the city, and the local police department decided to build there. A sign facing the camp explains the history of the site. They want to deliberately train officers here so that every day they are reminded of what they shouldn’t be – the dark period in history when law enforcement became the enforcement of terror and torture. 

The police building is an example of the complex questions innate to memory culture. Is it better  to destroy buildings, or to preserve and contextualize them? Should memorials physically reconstruct history, or do they risk trivializing places and signaling false authenticity?  All answers are riddled with paradoxes. One building, for example, serving as a game center for the SS, has been preserved, but both the memorial and the police academy want nothing to do with a site that represents casual recreation amidst the most brutal tragedies.

On the singularity of Nazism 

A visit to Sachsenhausen raises questions. How could they do it? How did they rationalize and justify it? For the Nazis, these camps had “value” in that they helped entrench political control and hegemony by imprisoning political opponents, dissidents, and citizens. Slave labor was a solution for German companies, like BMW and Siemens, who were losing workers to the German military. 

But the murder of Jews with the aim of extermination raises even harder questions. It is a unique horror.