When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I was home sick one summer and was watching reruns of the old show Lou Grant, starring Ed Asner. I thought, 'Hey! Newspapering sounds fun.' He was a grizzled old city editor; this seemed like an interesting line of work.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran was bureau chief in Baghdad for the first two years of the Iraq war, and has been a correspondent in Cairo and Southeast Asia.

He was journalist-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

He the author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, an account of the troubled American effort to reconstruct Iraq, and Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan.