Azam Ahmed is an international investigative correspondent for The New York Times. His new book is Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother's Quest for Vengeance.

“I think the fundamental question I always ask when I go into a new place, whether I’m covering currencies, or hedge funds, or geopolitics in Afghanistan, or the war—it’s what does this mean to the world right now? What does the world need to know and how does it fit into that space?”

Show notes:

• @azamsahmed
• Ahmed on Longform
• Ahmed’s New York Times archive
• 20:00 “For Afghan Officials, Prospect of Death Comes with Territory” (New York Times • Dec 2012)
• 21:00 “A Day’s Toil in the Suicide Bombers’ Graveyard” (New York Times • Aug 2013)
• 21:00 “2 Afghan Sisters, Swept Up in a Suicide Wave” (New York Times • March 2013)
• 25:00 “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One” (New York Times • Dec 2020)
• 46:00 “Using Texts as Lures, Government Spyware Targets Mexican Journalists and Their Families” (New York Times • June 2017)
• 48:00 “In Mexico, ‘It’s Easy to Kill a Journalist’” (New York Times • April 2017)
• 54:00 “Kill, or Be Killed: Latin America’s Homicide Crisis” (New York Times • May 2019–Feb 2020)

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