kevin peraino: what is the trick? you are talking about grief ability and you are covering nonwestern lives. what is the trick to getting readers interested in subjects with names that are hard to pronounce and live far from the u.s.? yeah, i thinks: we have all experienced a foreign story where they say, we need an american character in the story. that is one of the realities of the western media. which on one level is understandable because western readers relate to western characters. but the western press is not the local hometown paper. it is the global discourse of power that affects the lives and he foreign policy that affects the lives around the world. so i think one of the ways to get people interested in the is to write in characters. in the case of the serious story, as a length of a thousand words, you get to tell the back story and you can make the characters relatable and funny and make people care about them. easy. is not it is something that i struggle with all the time. to make my work more percentag