25th anniversary of my NYTimes profile

It makes me feel old to admit to a quarter-century anniver­sary for some­thing that hap­pened in my ear­ly thir­ties but 25 years ago today, New York Times pub­lished a pro­file of my work on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. Thanks to a great archive sec­tion, you can still read it on their website.

While many orgs have pub­lic rela­tions depart­ments ded­i­cat­ed to plant­i­ng sto­ries, this one hap­pened pret­ty organ­i­cal­ly. I fol­lowed Lisa Napoli’s work in what the Times then called its “Cyber­times” sec­tion (a pre­cur­sor to the less cringey “Tech” sec­tion of today) and liked her arti­cles. It was sev­en years after the first Gulf War and Pres­i­dent Clin­ton was saber rat­tling in Iraq again. I won­dered how the peace move­ment would orga­nize dif­fer­ent­ly now that the inter­net was becom­ing a real orga­niz­ing tool and I sus­pect­ed Napoli might be inter­est­ed. I shot an email and she respond­ed imme­di­ate­ly and set up an inter­view. A pho­tog­ra­ph­er came to my house and took a lot of pic­tures (includ­ing a real­ly cringey one of me play­ing a gui­tar that graced the Cyber­times front page but has not been archived, thank goodness.)

It’s espe­cial­ly fun­ny to me to see how dat­ed some of the lan­guage and ref­er­ences are.

Posted February 21st, 2023 , in Quaker.