People Column

SCHOLARS

Michael Wakin, the Fritz Beebe Fellowship winner in 2024, is currently working toward his PhD in International Relations at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a Senior Editor for Global Politics at the Oxford Political Review; also working as an editorial assistant at Perspectives on Politics, an academic journal. In a recent piece Wakin wrote for the Oxford Political Review, he talked with Richard Haass, who is the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Wakin recently completed his OPC Foundation fellowship at the Dubai bureau of The Associated Press.

Genevieve Finn, the 2020 Richard Pyle Scholarship winner, started as an assistant editor at The Atlantic this month. She will primarily be fact-checking for the print magazine, but also in the newsroom and on podcasts. Prior to her new role at The Atlantic, she fact-checked at Harper’s and n+1, a print and digital magazine. Finn had an OPC Foundation fellowship with The Associated Press in Mexico City.

Meghan Sullivan, the Walter and Betsy Cronkite Fellowship winner in 2020, was among five veteran journalists named as the latest recipients of the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism. Each of the winning projects will receive a grant of up to $15,000. The McGraw Fellowships, an initiative of the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, were created in 2014 to support in-depth stories that “follow the money.” A freelance investigative journalist based between Alaska and Washington D.C., Sullivan will report on fraud schemes that target tribal corporations.

Isabel DeBre, the Stan Swinton Fellowship winner in 2018, has started a new role as The Associated Press’ senior correspondent for the Southern Cone based in Buenos Aires, covering Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Before relocating to South America this past spring, she worked for more than five years in the Middle East, most recently as an AP reporter for Gaza and the West Bank covering the Israel-Hamas war. Prior to Jerusalem, she worked as a correspondent in AP’s Cairo and Dubai bureaus, where she covered Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and the Gulf.

UPDATES

OPC member Lucy Sherriff, a freelancer based in Los Angeles, has been writing about her displacement and recovery from the Pacific Palisades fire that destroyed her home. She relocated to Oregon and Washington to stay with friends in the days following the fires, and has been working through filing for renter’s insurance and other tasks. She wrote in a Jan. 22 article for The Story Exchange that “Trying to find the mental space to complete mundane, tedious admin tasks whilst holding emotional space to process the trauma of what you’ve just been through is a difficult juggle to say the least.” In a piece just one week after the fires, titled “What It’s Been Like to Be Pregnant and (Now) Homeless in LA,” she lead with an abbreviated list of lost items: “Decades of journals, my partner Maurice’s artwork … Hard drives with years of documentary filming and photography. A small drawer I’d cleared out, empty save for a tiny onesie — our unborn baby’s first piece of clothing. I could go on, and on, and on.” Sherriff has discussed the fires for many outlets, including BBC and New York Magazine.

The Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship (IDJC) has announced that OPC Governor Josh Fine, an investigative reporter and producer, will be one of its two inaugural fellows for its newly launched IDJC Visiting Fellows program. The program provides workspace for fellows at its Washington, D.C. headquarters, and a stipend for travel and projects. In a release, Fine said he plans to explore better ways to fund investigative sports journalism. “As the journalism industry changes, it’s critical that accountability-based sports journalism endures.”

OPC member Astrid Landon published a story with Prospect Magazine, published on Jan. 11, about sexual assistance, a controversial practice in France. Sexual assistants, also called surrogates, are paid to provide intimate support to persons with disabilities, allowing them to experience sexual pleasure and connection. The story explores this issue through the case of APPAS, a French association which trains surrogates and connects them with clients. Reporting for this piece was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Kim Wall Memorial Fund.

OPC member Michael Kay has launched a new weekly show on BBC News titled The Security Brief. In an episode that aired in December, he covered a UK announcement of a new £225 million package of military support for Ukraine. Kay is a former assault helicopter pilot with the British Armed Forces. In the segment, he took viewers behind the scenes of Operation Interflex, the world’s largest overseas training program for Ukrainian troops.

Mark Clifford, an OPC member and author, published a new book in December. The book, titled The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, chronicles Jimmy Lei’s life as an activist and events surrounding the raid on pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily in 2020. Clifford was a director at Apple Daily when its journalists were jailed and the paper shut down by the government in 2021. Clifford participated in an OPC book night in February 2022 to discuss a previous book, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World. He is scheduled to speak to the Asia Society on Feb. 19 to discuss The Troublemaker.