Nicholas D. Kristof
Nicholas D. Kristof
Nicholas Donabet Kristofis an American journalist, author, op-ed columnist, and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He has written an op-ed column for The New York Times since November 2001, and The Washington Post says that he "rewrote opinion journalism" with his emphasis on human rights abuses and social injustices, such as human trafficking and the Darfur conflict. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa has described Kristof as an "honorary African" for shining a spotlight on neglected conflicts...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 April 1959
CountryUnited States of America
There could be a powerful international women's rights movement if only philanthropists would donate as much to real women as to paintings and sculptures of women.
Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.
If President Bush is serious about genocide, an immediate priority is to stop the cancer of Darfur from spreading further, which means working with France to shore up Chad and the Central African Republic.
The equivalent of five jumbo jets' worth of women die in labor each day, but the issue is almost never covered.
I think it's dangerous to be optimistic. Things could go terribly wrong virtually overnight
Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did... In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education.
The fact that people will pay you to talk to people and travel to interesting places and write about what intrigues you, I am just amazed by that.
One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.
Half a million women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.
The bulk of the emails tend to come after a column. I can get about 2,000 after a column.
More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century. The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.
In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.
Americans of faith should try as hard to save the lives of African women as the lives of unborn fetuses.