Dave Eggers

Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity. ”

I'm an amateur science enthusiast. I'm not even a professional enthusiast. I don't know anything; I never even passed biology in high school. But I read the science section of the newspaper. ”

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students. ”

But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization. ”

The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003. ”

I worked at Salon.com way back when they started, and there's just unmeasurable value to distributing words online, too, but I still get my news from the newspaper in the morning. ”

But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia. ”

You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they're smart people. But you don't throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff. ”

I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems. ”

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time. ”