Author: akopsa

Cambodia’s de-facto dictatorship

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Jonestown for TIME Magazine

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My article from TIME magazine about PTSD and first responders Members of a US military team prepare aluminum coffins for shipment to the United States, following the more than 900 deaths in the mass suicide staged in Jonestown by members of the People's Temple and their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, Georgetown, Guyana, November 24, [...]

On Slow Journalism – Nieman Interview

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https://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/5ish-questions-andy-kopsa-and-the-slow-payoff-of-freelance-longform-work/ Andy Kopsa is a freelancer crafting her career from longform journalism, specializing in investigations. She has written for The Atlantic, The Nation and even Teen Vogue and was the recipient of a 2013 Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion in American Public Life from USC Annenberg.For The Nation, she tracked down LGBT inmates in Cameroon. Spent [...]

On Grief – NYTimes

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I got a text message from my father. My first thought: impossible — that old man doesn’t know how to text. My second thought: impossible — my father is dead. My dad died on Sept. 4 — a Tuesday — just a month shy of his 82nd birthday. He was a farmer, just like my grandfather, and was the hardest working [...]

Emily

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    For families like the Koesters, health care is more than just politicians arguing on cable news. In the year after the kidney transplant, Emily was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphoma, had her lymph nodes removed from her neck as well as her adenoids, and started chemotherapy. During that same period, she was diagnosed [...]

Guns

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  My first night in Louisville, Jim showed me his guns. The born-and-bred Kentucky boy stores them in a hulking safe with a keypad lock, hidden inside a walk-in closet. Over 5 feet tall and almost 4 feet wide, it easily holds Jim's collection of pistols, rifles and handguns, with room to spare. Lining the [...]

Shaming and Failing

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How a Bungled Police Investigation Led to a Possible Rape Victim's Shaming One sexual-assault kit. Clothing — underwear, dress pants, sport jacket, white shirt and shoes. Four vials of blood. One container of urine. Photos of bruises and abrasions on the woman's body. Dried secretions, soil and debris, suspected semen and saliva. Matted hair cuttings. [...]

Women & HIV

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As the 2016 International AIDS Conference was underway in Durban last month, I was reminded of Florence Buluba, a Ugandan woman I met at the 2012 biennial gathering in Washington, D.C. Buluba ran the National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Not two years later, I found myself in in Buluba’s office, situated atop one [...]

Limitations

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  After this month, victims of pedophile priests in the Catholic church will no longer be able to find justice – at least, not in Hawaii or Minnesota, two states that extended the statute of limitations (SOL) after a renewed wave of allegations came to light in 2013. This is yet another perfect example of our country’s [...]

Mississippi

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Sex Ed Without Condoms? Welcome to Mississippi Last fall I sat at friend's dining table in Jackson, Mississippi, talking with people about sex, politics and religion. These subjects are rarely mentioned individually in polite Southern company -- the idea of discussing them all at the same time took on an air of scandal. As it [...]

Cameroon

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The daily tally of prisoners in Yaoundé Central Prison, on the outskirts of Yaoundé, Cameroon, is on a chalkboard the size of a Ping-Pong table affixed to the wall. Today there are 4,113. The prison administrator—we started calling him “the Governor”—tracks the inmates. This one is in the hospital, that one is being transferred, another [...]