I'm not a barbarian.

Paris certainly needs to promote itself. Although still the most visited city in the world, it has fallen behind London and Berlin in terms of cool.

When the body breaks down, it does not all go at once; it goes piece by piece.

In America, people know there are always 10 people better than them who are after their job. In France, they know that too - but no one is going to get their job till they go to their grave.

Any protester knows that the only way activism works is to get the people on your side.

In Pakistan, the right to go to school is not a given. In the more rural areas, a girl is born, married off as early as 9 years old, and basically lives life under the control of men.

Little changes can start to make a difference in the world.

I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.

Occupy Wall Street was a disorganized movement without a clear focus and power base - essential in any successful revolution - but the message was clear: the divisions between those who are fortunate enough to enjoy city living as opposed to those who find it unbearable are too wide.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons - to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.

The fact is, feminism is not what it used to be.

It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

The pope is an intelligent man and realizes that time marches on. He says the Church has a long way to go in developing a real strategy that integrates women - but clearly he is baffled as to how to do it.

Every time the Catholic Church takes one step forward, it seems to take one giant step back.

My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.

Hats, giant shades and 60-plus sunblock are part of my summer repertoire. I don't want wrinkles, but it's skin cancer I truly fear.

My mother came from a generation that did not want nannies. She had her first child at 24 and her last - me - at 42.

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

It can't be bad having a mother who is fulfilled by her work.

During war time, when people were injured, I was really frustrated I did not become a doctor. It's painful not being able to save people, witnessing their pain.

I did not read newspapers until I became a reporter.

I never set out to be a journalist. I wanted to be a humanitarian doctor like Albert Schweitzer, working in Africa.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.