penname.

lindsaurus:

Veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin, an American who was working for The Sunday Times of Britain, and award-winning French photojournalist Remi Ochlik died Wednesday in the Syrian government’s bombardment of the city of Homs.

If you’re not keeping up with what’s happening in Syria, I am pleading with you to look it up. Not because an American journalist died, but because thousands of Syrians have died since the beginning of the uprising last March. You can help with a few keystrokes; petitions through Amnesty International and Avaaz have been incredibly successful in reaching key leaders who have the power to stop bloodshed.

A lot of you have been posting commentary about the issues in this country regarding potential laws on contraception and women’s health, so I know you care about human rights. Please take the two minutes it will take to click the links above and add your names. What you do after that is up to you.

newyorker:

A Tribute to Marie Colvin

As I drove to the ice rink with my wife and kids up here in Vermont, where we are spending a few days’ vacation, I thought about the choices we all make. Marie made hers many years ago, devoting her life to being a war correspondent. Everything else—her health, her family, her personal life—came second. Naturally, she sometimes thought of doing something else, something less crazy. At our last lunch, she spoke in her throaty-voiced way about the possibility of writing a book and dialing it back—maybe getting a gig at a think tank or a journalism school. I think we both knew she’d never do it. Many moons ago, she quit reporting for a while and spent a couple of years on the Sunday Times foreign desk, rewriting copy and managing other reporters. She nearly died of boredom…

…We all have to die sometime. Marie died doing what she loved, what made her feel most alive, what turns journalism from a job into something bigger and more noble: a mission. It’s perhaps not much of a consolation to her many friends and her family, but it’s what happened.

- In today’s Daily Comment, John Cassidy remembers Marie Colvin: http://nyr.kr/zxBWTq