Probably the first thing on all of our minds is your health. How is your shoulder healing?
My shoulder's feeling much better. I went back to work the first week of May and, while it's still pretty sore, particularly on deadline, I'm able to do pretty much what I want to do. I'll probably end up losing some strength in my right shoulder, but I keep telling myself it could have been far worse.
Until recently, you hadn't really done much reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict specifically. How did you end up in Ramallah?
I was a correspondent with the Associated Press in Cairo from 1995 to 1999, a period in which I traveled occasionally to Israel and the Palestinian territories to help out. So I had experience there, even though I hadn't traveled to Jerusalem since 1996. In general, it's a story you can't help become familiar with if you cover the Middle East, and I feel comfortable writing about it.
Since September, I've focused mainly on political Islam, the subject of a book I finished in 2000. But given the Globe's size, the pool of foreign reporters is relatively small, so we end up helping out on a wide range of stories. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, I had traveled to Europe, the Arab world, and Afghanistan. Jerusalem was pretty much another assignment, one that was supposed to last just a few weeks. Once I was there, I basically followed the news, and the news quickly became Ramallah.