This site is generally not a landing pad for upbeat news but this morning let’s work outside the patterns.

A quick thread.

The photo below is of a bag of stem cells collected yesterday from one of my sons, who volunteered to be a stem-cell donor for @BeTheMatch. My son, Mick, is 20. He signed up months ago to be a donor. His motivations were many, but among them was the early death of an uncle he never met, felled by cancer before Mick was born, as well of Mick’s awareness of his own good fortune. Never take good health for granted.

Archive of the Afghan War Casualty Report, a long and dedicated effort by journalists at @nytimes to track and share news of human costs in the latter years of war too few people followed throughout. nytimes.com/spotlight/afgh… Of note, officials in the US military demanded we cease this project and threatened our staff with sanctions -- including denial of access, embeds and interviews -- if we did not. The staff continued the work.

The New York Times is about to begin an all-staff meeting w/ the paper's leadership to discuss the Op-Ed by Senator Cotton. I neither expect nor deserve to have front-of-line mic time there, so will speak here. I say what follows as a longtime @nytimes employee and foreign correspondent who covered police, military, and intelligence service violence against peaceful citizens in authoritarian states.

i almost never post threads, but will today. about two years ago, @nytimes hired two relatively new reporters who are veterans of recent american wars: @johnismay (a former @USNavy explosive ordnance disposal tech) & @Tmgneff (a former @usmc rifleman and sniper team leader.) /1 @nytimes @johnismay @USNavy @Tmgneff @USMC hiring john and tm was not coincidence. it was purposeful. editors at the paper, after considerable discussion, had decided they wanted many of the attributes that people with john's and tm's experience can offer to newsrooms and readers. /2