The whole thing started when film producer Linda Goldstein Knowlton adopted her own baby girl from China in 2006. She realized she wanted to make a film that answered her own questions about what her daughter Ruby’s life would be like in the years ahead.

“Knowing her life would be so different from mine I just had a lot of questions as a prospective neurotic mother,” said Goldstein Knowlton. “I had this opportunity because there were thousands and thousands of young women who were already teenagers who were adopted from China and I wanted to go find out about their perspective.”

The result is Goldstein Knowlton’s deeply affecting film about four teenagers trying to figure out who they are. The title “Somewhere Between” speaks to the way they feel caught between worlds.

Take Fang Lee of Berkeley, California. She was given up for adoption at the age of 5 but visits China often. In an interview in the film when she’s 15, Fang describes herself as “a child stuck between two countries.” She says she doesn’t think that makes her Chinese-American or American or absolutely Chinese. “So I guess I’m kind of confused about my identity,” she concludes.

She’s not the only one. Jenna Cook of Newburyport, Massachusetts and her sister Sara are shown expressing similar sentiments, musing about whether they’re white on the inside and Chinese on the outside, or whether it’s more of a mix, like “scrambled eggs.”

At the heart of the film is the story of Haley Butler of Nashville, Tennessee, the youngest of the four girls and the one you see most transformed through the course of the film. She starts out wondering about her origins and ends up returning to China in search of her birth family. And against all the odds, she finds them on her first try. But Goldstein Knowlton wasn’t there to witness it.

“None of us expected this to happen,” says Goldstein Knowlton. “You know, going into the decision knowing that Haley was going to search, I really weighed out whether we should go or not and to be honest with you, I did not want to go and film her disappointment. So imagine my surprise to get the email and the subject line that says in call caps, OPEN IMMEDIATELY, and the whole email said I think I found my birth family…and you’re not here!”

Luckily Goldstein Knowlton had given each of the girls a video camera so a friend was able to capture that initial meeting. And once the genetic ties were confirmed through DNA testing, Haley returned for a full reunion and celebration replete with village fireworks and a feast, this time with the film crew in tow. She was just 14 then. Now 17, Haley says she’s deeply grateful.

“I have that captured on a wonderful camera and big screen forever,” she says. “You know when I have a family I can show them what it was like when I found my parents and what it was like when I went back to the village where my family was from.”

Now that the film is out and she’s had time to reflect on the whole thing, Haley is aware that the footage of that reunion has a powerful emotional effect on viewers. She worries her experience could be misleading to kids like her who might want to search themselves one day.

“It was ridiculously easy but I didn’t want to give false hope to people who hadn’t started to think about finding their family yet,” she says. “I really don’t want that to happen I hope everyone listening can take that to heart and know that my experience was very individual.”

And in fact what comes through in the film is just how individual the stories are, how different each girl is from the next, and yet how much they share. Fang now realizes a lot of her own journey has been about growing comfortable with the unknown.

“People expect us to know, they expect us to have answers,” she says. “One thing this movie and meeting all these lovely young women in the adoption community has helped me to realize is it’s okay not to know; it’s okay to say I don’t have the answer for you.”

Fang and the others come across as remarkably self-aware. It’s tempting to wonder if being part of the film project has made them so. It has certainly given meaning to their stories. Jenna says in the end the film isn’t really about its four subjects.

“It’s about our lives,” she says. “But it’s not about us, about these four individuals. It’s about these huge questions: What is family? What is kinship? What is identity? What is race? These core, core, questions.”

Audiences across the country seem to be responding to those questions, which is gratifying to Linda Goldstein Knowlton. It makes sense to her too.

“We’re a nation of immigrants,” she says. “And so everybody, in one way or another, is “somewhere between” in so many different ways in their lives. The universal part of this story that these young women have given as a gift, it’s exceeded my dreams.”

“Somewhere Between” opens in Denver, Minneapolis and other cities on Friday.

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It’s mind-blowing what this video has achieved in such a short time. I first saw it when my 22-year-old goddaughter posted it to her Facebook page. I remember thinking: I didn’t know she was interested in Joseph Kony and the LRA. I suspect she was one of those many who’d never heard of him before the video made the rounds. And yet she was hooked immediately.

I have written for years about heartbreaking issues of war and atrocity and the shortfall between international rhetoric and action. I’ve often struggled with the apparent mismatch between the horror of what’s going on and people’s blithe ignorance of it. But knowledge isn’t everything. As Samantha Power pointed out in her book, A Problem from Hell, policymakers didn’t not act in Rwanda for lack of knowing what was going on. That’s even more apparent today in Syria where slaughter is unfolding daily as the world watches on Youtube.

Furthermore, as Rebecca Hamilton argued so well in Fighting for Darfur, even when a movement mobilizes enormous political pressure and political will around something as morally urgent as apparent genocide in Darfur, it does not necessarily follow that the policy prescriptions will turn out to be the right or most effective ones.

So in this case, do the benefits of mass awareness trump the downsides of distorting the story? Or will a well-meaning but not-quite-well-enough-informed mass of people put pressure in all the wrong places, making a bad situation even worse?

As for the editors among us, the video raises difficult questions about how to best tell the stories we want to tell, how best to reach people, how much to pare down the essence of a story and still stay true to reality. Is Jason Russell off the hook precisely because he’s doing advocacy? Or does he owe us something different? Whatever you might think about his storytelling, there’s no denying he’s got millions of people hooked.

This morning, reading the accolades for Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times correspondent who died of an asthma attack in Syria, I am reminded of how much I trusted his reporting in the region precisely because of his Arabic.

I remember a piece from the early days of the war in Iraq when he was able to pick up that residents of a particular neighborhood were giving one version of events to English-speaking journalists working with translators just ahead of him but singing a different tune among themselves. He hung back and listened and reported a different tale, conscious himself of how valuable his Arabic was in that context.

That sort of treatment made you feel you were getting the real deal when you read Shadid’s version of events. Add to that his devotion to the region, his beautiful (and seemingly effortless) prose, and his wise analysis of complicated, turbulent events, and there was no better correspondent.

Anthony Shadid was a great friend to our show, often going out of his way to make time for an interview with Lisa or Marco. Just last week he apologetically turned us down because he was about to hit the road on what turned out to be his last reporting trip. He said he’d be back in a week.

When he visited us in our Boston studio last September he told Lisa how enormous the Arab Spring story felt. “The feeling I have more often than not is just simply being overwhelmed,” he said.

Mostly the open floor plan is incredibly useful – everyone involved in our daily broadcast and web operations needs to communicate almost constantly and much of it can be done easily because we’re close together and not cut off by doors and cubicle walls. But as many of us would attest, the continual interruptions are also wearing, and those who want to concentrate on longer-term projects have migrated to the back of the room, furthest from the hubbub of the daily production fray. Just this week a colleague asked whether I minded if he moved desks so he could sit in a more remote part of the room. He said he was tired of being right next to the studio with the door opening and closing and continual foot traffic and conversations right over his shoulder. I had nothing but sympathy for his plight and heartily endorsed the idea.

Susan Cain’s piece suggests that many creative types are introverts who crave solitude and work best alone. Many of us I suspect are somewhere along the middle of the spectrum, thriving on contact but needing quiet as well. My dream has long been to have an office with a door on it where I can read and write whatever I want. In reality my career has unfolded in newsroom environments, where work is performed in the midst of white noise, machines, constant contact with colleagues and frenetic daily deadlines. Perhaps that’s why it’s such a relief to go on a reporting trip and be lost in my own thoughts for long stretches of travel. Not to mention actually doing the real on-the-ground reporting that is the lifeblood of what we do at The World.

But having said that, what if I were suddenly presented with that quiet office; would I find it as productive as I like to think it would be? Or is it precisely the intensity and discipline and stimulation of the newsroom environment that has kept me churning out radio all these years? Cain’s piece doesn’t really address the question of motivation and how it’s affected by the proximity or not of colleagues. Surely there’s a mixture of peer pressure and peer support that many of us rely on to keep the daily juices flowing. I’m sure creative geniuses have no trouble generating material in solitude, but what about the rest of us?!

I’d love to know your thoughts—how you work best, what the architecture of your workplace is like, whether you think Susan Cain is right about the dangers of the New Groupthink. Perhaps, as she suggests, even in a newsroom like ours, we should be creating places where people can get some quiet and solitude on a regular basis to see if it induces a different kind or quality of work. I can’t help thinking this particular dilemma of solitude vs. physical proximity mirrors the dilemma of how much time to spend reading and writing vs. clicking on videos or tweeting. It’s all about how much interaction is optimal in a creative, intellectual life. And I suspect the answer is very different depending on who you are. Which means only some of you will feel like leaving a comment below!

Well this week Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote at the Atlantic that he thought it was time to consider outside military intervention. His friend and colleague Marc Lynch of George Washington University immediately countered with a post at Foreign Policy arguing what a bad idea he thought that was.

We invited them both to debate the issue on our air Thursday with host Marco Werman. What resulted was a really lively, brisk, to-the-point conversation.

We ran a 6-minute version on the radio but for those who are really interested in the topic you can also hear/download the full 18-minute interview here.

We also invited comments on that page and I was heartened to see people writing thoughtfully about the question. It’s my hope that Marc and Steven will weigh in on those comments as well. Did we miss something? Let me know what else we should have asked in the comments below.

As we knit together our radio show and web page we are always looking for ways to engage with you all, whether you’re a casual listener or an expert in whatever we’re talking about. Let us know how we can do that better and also what other foreign policy dilemmas you’d like to see us debate on air.

Thanks for listening to The World and engaging here on the site and on Facebook and Twitter. You make us better!

One influential book was obviously Philip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. I still look to him for wisdom on these issues so it was heartening to see his New Yorker post yesterday about the carnage in Syria.

I too have been watching the evolution of the R2P or “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine over the years and pondering its application to Syria. Much of what’s written about R2P tends to focus on its limitations but I’m still struck that the term has come as far as it has in our public discourse.

(For a really accessible and masterful treatment of R2P issues, check out Rebecca Hamilton’s Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide.)

I won’t be writing much about any of this while I’m show-producing rather than reporting, but once you’ve delved into these questions they’re never far from your mind. Which is why I find myself still drawn to news from places like Rwanda and Sudan, even as I am tasked with a much broader mandate.

On the Rwanda front, there was an important, if little-reported, development this week—yet another investigation into the circumstances surrounding the plane crash that touched off the genocide. It’s noteworthy that Linda Melvern gives this latest report a lot of credence. She’s a British investigative reporter who has pretty much dedicated her career to chronicling the details of the genocide and the world’s failure to respond to it. Here’s her piece from the Guardian on Tuesday: “Rwanda: at last we know the truth.”

And then there’s today’s chilling front page story in the New York Times by Jeffrey Gettleman in South Sudan. He writes that “heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.”

I am learning that I can’t fill a radio program with reports of atrocities every day. No one would listen. But this story reminds me that those atrocities are indeed unfolding out there and it is incredibly important to bear witness to them, as Gettleman has done for us today.

I remember him telling me the funding for his position was funded by an NGO. One of the big issues in Haiti right now is the tension over the role of international NGOs in the country’s governance and economy. Critics complain they distort the local economy, suck power and money away from the Haitian State and don’t do enough for the people of Haiti.

The BBC’s always-thoughtful Allan Little has a new documentary on the subject.

We’ve also touched on these themes in recent interviews on The World, with Paul Farmer of Partners in Health (considered by many to be among the most effective NGOs in Haiti) and Linda Polman, author of The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?.

Sometimes the arguments become frustrating and cyclical; it’s clearly not an either or situation. Haiti needs NGOs and it also needs a stronger, healthier government. Still, there’s clearly an urgent and important discussion going on; I for one hope it leads to better outcomes.

Follow @jebsharp

But much of the essential work goes on behind the scenes. A prime example is my colleague Carol Hills.

She was a driving force behind the conception and development of The World in the early days. In fact she hired and mentored me when I came on board as a staff reporter in 1998.

These days she’s a part-time producer and editor of our Global Political Cartoons. She’s developed a unique beat devoted to those cartoons and the cartoonists who create them. (Some great recent posts here, here and here.)

She’s on Twitter @globalcartoons.)

Her on-air chats and online slideshows are proving to be a vital link between our radio and web operations as we morph into a different kind of digital future.

Carol is also a source of endless great ideas and a conscience for the program. Just this morning she was haranguing me about Syria coverage and the importance of staying on the story and finding fresh angles (see Carol’s powerful story about Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat) and interesting ways into the unfolding tragedy there.

She’s right but she’s also vying for attention for a story in the context of a very big world full of complex issues that all clamor for coverage. I need colleagues like her to remind me what’s urgent, what’s vital, what’s not OK to ignore.

Thanks Carol!

For a while now I’ve been meaning to start a “show producer’s blog” — a place to jot down thoughts about the news, the program, the production day, the issues that come up in the course of doing what we do, and best of all, I hope, a place to engage with all of you about the stories we do. So here goes:

I hadn’t planned to write about this today but here’s one issue we clearly haven’t tackled hard enough yet: it’s 1 pm and I’ve just realized with all the day’s interviews either recorded or scheduled and the reporter pieces all in and “mixed,” there are barely any female voices in the program…which goes to show that just having a woman in the show producer role isn’t enough to change The World.

Actually it’s a bit unfair to focus on today’s program because there are many days we do have a wonderful mix of voices. Still, I know the trend is there.

It’s been studied and illustrated before across various news media. It’s just all the more sobering to have it illustrated so starkly on one’s own watch. I certainly have thoughts about how to include more women on our air…but I’d love to know yours.

Let me know in the comments below.

“It almost seems as if the Alawites now in power feel as though it’s a duty to all of those Alawites who have raised their sect into a position of power in Syria,” said Lesch. “That it would be betraying what they had done if they let go of power.”

For all its faults, the Assad regime has cultivated a kind of secular pluralism that has allowed different religions to coexist relatively peacefully. And the protestors themselves have been calling for national unity.

But as the conflict between the protestors and the regime intensifies, so does the potential for exacerbating the differences that lie beneath the surface. Robin Yassin-Kassab, a London-based writer of Syrian descent, says there are two poles of Syrian existence and you can’t ignore either one of them.

“One of them is the sectarianism, which is bad,” Yassin-Kassab said. “It exists. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Amongst some people it exists quite strongly. On the other hand, there’s this ancient tradition, thousands of years old, before Islam and Christianity really, this ancient tradition of disparate groups living together in cities and coexisting. Syrian history kind of oscillates between these two poles.”

Yassin-Kassab says the Syrian regime is stoking fears of sectarian conflict to shore up support. He says the regime wants to portray the demonstrations as akin to the violent tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in the 1980s.

The government’s crackdown back then culminated in a massacre of 20,000 people in the town of Hama. It still haunts people today. But, Yassin-Kassab says the two situations are not the same.

“Now we’ve had Alawis and Christians and Druze and so on have been involved in the protests,” said Yassin-Kassab. “There have also been people from all communities shot and tortured and the overwhelming majority of slogans are for national unity. People are calling things like “the Syrian people are One. It’s not a sectarian uprising and the regime is trying to pretend that it is.”

Yassin-Kassab shared an ominous anecdote to share about a friend from a prominent Alawite family unconnected to the regime.

“His parents are receiving threatening phone calls from anonymous numbers,” said Yassin-Kassab. “People saying things like ‘We know where you are, we’re coming after you, your time is up.’ His parents believe that these are Syrian Sunni Muslims, ordinary people, calling up and threatening what’s going to happen to the whole community once this regime has fallen. I believe and my friend believes that it’s actually more likely the Mukhabarat, the secret police, who are calling them up trying to scare them.”

Historian Anne Alexander, a fellow at Cambridge University, also thinks the regime is trying to use sectarianism as a counterrevolutionary tool. She says the real differences in Syria are not ones of religious identity but of social class and geography.

“One view point that I fundamentally disagree with is the perspective that sees the Middle East as some kind of fermenting mass of people who all hate each other on religious grounds,” said Alexander. “And that once you remove the strong state this will all fly apart into people trying to kill each other because their neighbor is from a different religion.”

In fact, says Alexander, the history of the region shows that the gut reaction of national protest movements is to fight for unity, while time and time again, the gut reaction of regimes is to use any mechanisms they can to break that unity apart. In Syria’s case that impulse could hasten the slide toward civil war.

The Arab Spring has put pressure on President Obama to articulate a coherent policy response. But he has been addressing each country on a case-by-case basis. Obama has been weighing the benefits of reform against the strategic costs of alienating key rulers.

Obama made it clear he was with the protestors in Tunisia and Egypt . In Libya he went to war on their behalf. But not in Syria, and the picture has been more complicated in Bahrain and Yemen. In this speech Thursday, Obama laid out some core principles that guide US policy.

“The US opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region,” Obama said. “The United States supports a set of universal rights and these rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law. And the right to choose your own leaders, whether you live in Baghdad, or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.”

Obama announced an economic aid initiative for the region starting with Egypt and Tunisia. He singled out those countries because Egypt is a longstanding ally and Tunisia was in the vanguard of the democratic wave. By contrast, Obama condemned Syria for choosing what he called the path of murder and mass arrest.

“The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests,” said Obama. “It must release political prisoners and stop unjust arrests it must allow human rights monitors to have access to cities like Daraa. And start a serious dialogue to advance a democratic transition.”

Obama said Syrian President Bashar al Assad, has a choice: Lead the transition or get out of the way. He compared Syria’s crackdown on protestors to that of Iran on the protestors of the Green Revolution two years ago.

But Obama also acknowledged that it’s not just America’s foes who are cracking down – it’s also friends like Yemen and Bahrain. And he said that friend and foe a like need to understand that they must take the risks that reform entails to have the full support of the United States.

Finally Obama called on the Israelis and Palestinians to continue to try to forge a peace which he argues is now more urgent than ever. And he encouraged Americans to see their own history in the upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Our nation was founded through a rebellion against an empire,” said Obama. “Our people fought a painful civil war that extended freedom and dignity those who were enslaved. And I would not be standing here today unless past generations turned to the moral force of non-violence as a way to perfect our union.”

Obama’s speech had many audiences Thursday and he tried to reach them all without causing too much offense. But his broad appeal for peaceful reform doesn’t change the tough strategic questions that litter the road ahead.
Video of the entire speech and analysis
The President’s Speech on Twitter
Text of the Speech

• BBC Coverage of Arab Unrest
• Jeb Sharp’s History Podcast: ‘How We Got Here’ website
• Follow Jeb Sharp on Twitter

From the National Geographic Archives
Laura Lynch: Taking Former Colonial Masters to Court
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
Clark Boyd on Yuri Gagarin (and that video of the space flute duet)
Clark Boyd’s tech podcast
Bay of Pigs

Remembering Chernobyl after 25 years
Abd El-Krim: A Moroccan hero who never was
Nations Look So Pretty from Afar
100 Years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

• Website for Ronald Bruce St John
• Libya: Continuity and Change
• NYT Op-Ed: Why Qaddafi Has Already Lost