Asra Nomani

01/27/21 • 48 min

Ep.53 — A journalist upends her life and career to help identify and bring to justice the network of militants who murdered her friend and fellow correspondent at The Wall Street, Daniel Pearl / Asra Nomani, journalist, author, activist and co-founder, The Pearl Project. On January 23rd, 2002, Asra Nomani was waiting at her home in Karachi, Pakistan, for her dear friend, Daniel Pearl, a correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, to return from a reporting assignment. Pearl and his wife, Mariane, who was pregnant with their first child were staying with Nomani while he was investigating the Al-Qaeda networks that had conspired to pull off the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil just a few months earlier. But Pearl never returned home. Pakistani militants kidnapped and held Pearl hostage before murdering him a week later. His captors then released a video of the beheading, shocking the world and galvanizing Nomani in her long and difficult quest to identify Pearl's killers and help bring them to justice. In this riveting episode, Nomani describes how Pearl’s murder helped shape her as a journalist, author and a feminist Muslim. And she shares how the tragedy gave her the courage to become an activist challenging the rise of Islamic extremism and what she perceives as the dangerous influence of Islamists in American politics — particularly on the Democratic Party. Nomani also discusses why she is speaking up against the growing influence of “critical race theory,” both in the U.S. public school systems and on American society as a whole. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: On January 23rd, 2002, Asra Nomani was waiting at her home in Karachi, Pakistan, for her dear friend, The Wall Street Journal correspondent, Daniel Pearl to come back from a reporting assignment. Pearl and his wife, Mariane, who was pregnant with their first child were staying with Nomani while he was investigating the Al-Qaeda networks that had conspired to pull off the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil just a few months earlier. But Danny Pearl never returned home. Pakistani militants kidnapped and held Pearl hostage before murdering him a week later. His captors then released a video of the beheading, shocking the world and galvanizing Nomani in her long and difficult quest to identify Pearl's killers and help bring them to justice. Chitra Ragavan: Hello everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan. Welcome to When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory an advisory firm helping technology startups with strategic brand positioning and narrative. I'm joined now by Asra Nomani. She's a journalist, author, activist and co-founder of The Pearl Project, a 31,000 word award-winning global investigative journalism report identifying the network of militants who perpetrated the heinous. Asra, welcome to the podcast. Asra Nomani: Oh, thank you so much, Chitra. I feel like I'm with such a good dear friend going into one of the darkest moments of my life, but I hope we can share some light with everyone. Chitra Ragavan: It's been 19 years, almost exactly two days shy of that fateful day, January 23rd, 2002, when your world and that of Danny Pearl and his whole family turned upside down. Tell me when you found out that something had badly gone wrong. Asra Nomani: Well, that day began like any other day for journalists in, posting overseas. We all wakened, Danny and his wife Mariane were visiting a house that I had rented in Karachi, Pakistan. And Danny, went about the business of all his flurry of interviews he had planned for the day. I found a car for him and we stood outside this home that I'd rented and waved goodbye to Danny. And I said, "See you later, buddy," because it was just an interview like any other that we go off to do and then come back home and write down our notes and write our dispatches. But that night, Mariane kept calling and calling Danny's phone number and he never picked up.

Previous Episode

Don MacKinnon

Ep.52 — A 15-year old develops a passion for making music mixtapes and revolutionizes the way you listen to music, and now he’s doing it for podcasts / Don MacKinnon, CEO & Founder, Hark. Don MacKinnon will never forget how he first began experimenting with music mixtapes back when he was a high school student. “I remember sitting on the floor of my room with the records spread out, organizing them, and making notes about the order I wanted to have the songs appear in. As you recorded it, you dropped the needle on the song and it's recording it in real-time on to the tape,” McKinnon reminisces. “While you're doing that, you're writing liner notes because the beauty of a mixtape is you end up with an artifact. A physical thing you can give to someone.” His passion for mixtapes led MacKinnon on a lifelong journey to help people around the world serendipitously discover, listen to, share, curate, and build a community around music, videos, and other content. MacKinnon’s goal has always been to free up music — and any inspiring content for that matter — from the confines of their origins, format, and surroundings, so that the world can appreciate them in all their wonders. And that idea has led to music curation platforms that we take so much for granted today, such as Spotify. “What is Spotify, but some giant mixtape?” says MacKinnon. “But there was a time when we walked to school in the snow. There was a time when songs were trapped on vinyl. There were albums were on vinyl. That's where the songs lived. There were radio DJs who mixed it up and play different songs from different albums on shows. But the ability to sit down, and liberate those songs from their albums, and create something new was fascinating to me.” Since his early discovery of mixtapes, McKinnon has pretty much used that formula over and over again with huge wins as a music producer including the Triple Platinum Grammy Award-winning Ray Charles compilation, Genius Loves Company, Rolling Stones Rarities 1971 to 2003, and Bob Dylan's iconic first recordings of Live at the Gaslight. Now, MacKinnon is about to transform how you discover, curate, and build community through podcasts using the same concept he pioneered in music — with what else, but mixtapes? Tomorrow, he's unveiling his new stealth podcast curation platform called Hark. “The idea for Hark at its simplest is to go and find those great moments within podcast episodes. You talking to Nina Totenberg about how as a young girl, she loves Nancy Drew, and how that inspired her to become Nina Totenberg,” says MacKinnon. “There are tons of examples of like, when we find ourselves telling people, all of you podcast listeners, ‘I have that moment where I want you to listen to the whole episode. But you got to hear this one moment.’ That one moment is the genius thing that will be their way in. The idea of Hark is, what if we could create an entire immersive listening experience out of the best moments from great podcast episodes, where we organize those moments into, yes, mixtapes, because what else would it be after listening to me for an hour?” This is an episode filled with great storytelling. You definitely don’t want to miss MacKinnon’s memories of how, on his 35th birthday, he got to interview every single member of the Rolling Stones. What it was like to interview his idol, Tom Waits, and the irascible Lou Reed. What was his first conversation with Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz? What it was like to work with U2’s Bono on Product Red. And what it was like to listen to Ray Charles and Elton John recording their hit duet, Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word for Charles’s triple-platinum, Grammy award-winning album, Genius Loves Company, the last album Charles recorded before he died, and it was produced by none other than MacKinnon. You’re going to love this interview with the amazing Don MacKinnon. I know I did. Read the Transcript Download the PDF

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John M. Barry

Ep. 54 — How writing a best-selling book on the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic positioned this author to become a prescient thought leader on the COVID-19 pandemic / John M. Barry, Author, Distinguished Scholar, Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. John Barry remembers the exact moment he gave up his boyhood dream of doing medical research for his other boyhood dream of writing. He was 13 years old and had returned from summer camp eager to examine some bacteria cultures he had grown and left in the freezer, only to find them gone. Little did he know it at the time, but after a long detour away from his childhood love for medical research, Barry would write an award winning book on science and medicine called, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. The acclaimed book, which he dreaded writing because of its complexity, positioned Barry to give timely history, context and framing for the COVID-19 pandemic when it exploded on the world stage last year. The crisis of pandemics and how to deal with them would largely take over Barry's life. Don’t miss my fascinating conversation with John M. Barry, prize winning and New York Times bestselling author of six books, two of which, The Great Influenza and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, have pulled Barry into various policy advising roles with state, federal, United Nations, and World Health Organization officials on influenza, water related disasters, and risk communication. Barry is currently a distinguished scholar at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. Read the Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: John Barry remembers the exact moment he gave up his boyhood dream of doing medical research for his other boyhood dream of writing. He was 13 years old and had returned from summer camp eager to examine some bacteria cultures he had grown and left in the freezer, only to find it gone. Chitra Ragavan: Hello, everyone. I'm Chitra Ragavan. Welcome to When It Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups with strategic brand positioning and narrative. Little did he know it at the time, but after a long detour away from his childhood love for medical research, Barry would write an award-winning book on science and medicine called, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Chitra Ragavan: The acclaimed book positioned him to give timely history, context, and framing for the COVID-19 pandemic when it exploded on the world stage last year. The crisis of pandemics and how to deal with them would largely take over Barry's life. I'm joined now by John M. Barry, prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of six books, two of which, The Great Influenza and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, have pulled Barry into various policy advising roles with state, federal, United Nations, and World Health Organization officials on influenza, water related disasters, and risk communication. Chitra Ragavan: Barry is currently a distinguished scholar at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans. John, welcome to the podcast. John M. Barry: Thanks for having me. Chitra Ragavan: You were pretty serious about medical research even when you were 11. How did that start? John M. Barry: I was just fascinated by it. I was one of those kids that had a lab in their home. I actually had a pretty good quality though ancient microscope. It had lights, lens, and things like that, an expensive microscope. Grew my own media, agar-agar, and all these dyes. I was playing with E. coli, which can kill you, but seemed pretty tame because I could use that in my school class. I figured if it was in school, it wasn't very exciting. I sent away to the American Bacteriological Supply House in Wa...