Born in Dayton, Ohio, Hockenberry grew up in upstate New York and Michigan, and attended the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon. The Takeaway marks John Hockenberry's return to his roots in public radio, where he was one of the medium's original innovators after 15 years in network and cable television. During his time at ABC and NBC, he earned four Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards, an Edward R. Murrow Award, and a Casey Medal. Hockenberry has also been recognized for his pioneering online content, hosts the award-winning public radio series The DNA Files, is a weeky commentator for the series The Infinite Mind and currently sits as a Distinguished Fellow at the prestigious MIT Media Lab. At NBC, he served as a correspondent for Dateline where his work ranged from an intimate portrait of a schizophrenic young adult to an investigative piece that traced internet swindlers in an international web to the first and only interview with the brother of two of the 9/11 suicide hijackers. He also hosted two of his own programs for MSNBC, Hockenberry and Edgewise. Hockenberry was one of the first Western broadcast journalists to report from Kurdish refugee camps in Northern Iraq and Southern Turkey. During the first Gulf War, he reported from Israel, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Hockenberry also spent two years as a correspondent based in Jerusalem during the most intensive conflict of the Palestinian uprising. Hockenberry is a contributing editor for Conde Nast Portfolio and Metropolis magazines and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, I.D., The Columbia Journalism Review, Details, Wired and The Washington Post. He and his wife Alison live in Brooklyn with their two sets of twins, Zoe, Olivia, Zachary and Regan.
One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained in the experience of a single reporter in a single place and time in any meaningful way. When it comes, it happens to everyone. Everything is in its path. Yet this is the allure of war reporting, the chance of acquiring some personal mother lode of truth to beam back to the living rooms of a waiting nation. The fear that comes from reporting on a war is as much a fear of missing this mother load as it is of being injured or killed in battle, and it sets reporters apart from the people who have to fight wars. Soldiers have their own agonies to think about as a battle approaches. Missing the war is not generally one of them.
In America access is always about architecture and never about human beings. Among Israelis and Palestinians, access was rarely about anything but people. While in the U. S. a wheelchair stands out as an explicitly separate experience from the mainstream, in the Israel and Arab worlds it is just another thing that can go wrong in a place where things go wrong all the time.
Design is the courage and brilliance to cover an original and make it different. .
