Quotes from Michael Paterniti

By living so long, the supercentenarian earns the prefixal 'super' and becomes a person suddenly freighted with power and meaning. He's Gandalf, Yoda, the Ancient Mariner, perhaps with some otherworldly insight. He's lived so long that, in fact, he's living the afterlife to his own initial life.

In January of 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay within a year's time, vowing to continue to fight terror but 'in a manner that is consistent with our values and ideals.' A plan was considered to move a number of detainees to stateside prisons in order to have them stand trial in civilian court.

Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot about the country and its history.

I wish we could all have a telling room, a place where we go to tell our stories and listen to the stories of others; in our culture, the telling room might be around the dinner table or in the car on a long trip.

Legend has it that when Franco's troops crushed Catalonia in 1939, relegating it for the next thirty-five years to abuse and neglect, one of his generals was asked what more he could possibly want now that he had Barcelona.

The monastery of Christ in the Desert had its resident hermit, Brother Xavier, chosen after years of devotion and service, a monk so trusted and experienced that he qualified by Benedictine standards to be sent to the front lines in the fight against the devil.

Albanians love topiary and fancy doors. They speak Albanian, an Indo-European language with traces of Greek and Latin - and the lek is their monetary denomination, which trades at one hundred to one on the dollar. Their food is excellent, a melange of Greek, Turkish, and Italian cuisine, all very fresh and legume-y.

'El Gordo' is the name given to the oldest lottery jackpot in the world - and the richest. Held every year in Madrid on December 22, the Christmas Lottery culminates with the picking of the El Gordo number, the Fat One, which, for many, has become the true Christmas miracle in Spain.

The telling room is, in Spanish, known as 'el contador.'

Being partly Italian or, rather, having an Italian last name, I've always dreamed of really becoming partly Italian, of eating piles of mouthwatering fettuccine in the piazza, speaking a language that demands music over mumble, and yes, if I'm honest, perhaps dressing a little better.

It is not uncommon for angels to take corporeal form, to appear before us on earth as people with names and credentials.

Sloppy casual has always been my default look. My preppier classmates in high school would sometimes sport two, three, even four shirts at a time - Lauren, Izod, Brooks Brothers, all collars-up - while I wore secondhand faded olive German-army fatigues and this cool T-shirt with a troll on it.

I do think that narrative, long-form nonfiction is the perfect form because it's rooted in something very real, but we're also, you know, completely spiritual, emotional creatures driven by all sorts of desires and needs.

Over time, Benedictine monasteries appeared around the world, always with the same anomaly: brothers living in obedience, meditation, and faith just beneath the rush of the world.

Ring Kuot, a 15-year-old Sudanese boy, was rumored to be eight feet three. And until Leonid's emergence at eight feet four inches last spring, people generally assumed that Radhouane Charbib of Tunisia, at seven feet nine, was the tallest documented man in the world.

I love when stories have something a little magical in them, and there's wonder and curiosity. Somewhere there are people living these improbable stories, and our job is to go out and find them and bring them to the page. And so, the more surprising, the more uplifting, the more sort of even inspiring a story is, I find myself gripped by those.

For a rapper as well-known as Drake, there remains an essential element of mystery about him. For one so open, there's a distance, and he prefers it that way. But then there's something beneath the exterior that reveals itself with urgency in conversation: Drake's raw ambition.

Listening to Brunello Cucinelli is like getting your own personal tutorial with a very glamorous, fatherly professor. He is charming and solicitous, speaking in an urgent, musical voice. Associates say he is both disciplined and happy, as well as extremely meticulous. When it comes to business, he's known as savvy and calculating.

What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.

I've been told there's a special golden shelf, in the secret vault kept at the back of every bookstore in America, that contains the Bible, 'War and Peace,' and 'Driving Mr. Albert.'

In the battle of substance over flash, few to none of the Al Jazeera correspondents are recognizable to U.S. audiences. Many have foreign names and accents; none have best-selling books atop the list or can be heard pounding their shoes on the nightly infotainment podium.

Storytelling is about patience, about making sense of the moments of pathos and beauty that you find, and about carrying these moments back into your own life.

Roja Dove believes that by test and experimentation - by a sort of psychoanalysis via fragrance - you can find the flavors and smells that connect you both to the here and now and to memories of the past.

The lucky village of Sodeto, in the kingdom of Aragon, is a cluster of sensible houses spackled together off the main road, curtained behind a pine copse.