In One Person, the Story of a Place

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A Holocaust survivor who plays music for his neighborhood; a farmhouse poet in China turned international literary celebrity; a guy who’s walking the earth with his donkey, Judas.

Local figures from around the world fill the Saturday Profile feature, which weaves colorful characters into the larger scope of The New York Times’s international coverage. The profiles capture people from all walks of life in the countries Times journalists report from.

“They don’t have to be famous people,” said Kyle Crichton, the editor of the column. “They just have to be interesting.”

Mr. Crichton, a deputy international editor in The Times’s London office, took over the column soon after it began in 2002, and has since shaped it into the weekly staple that it is today.

“The animating idea of it was to highlight people that you might never really see in the big news cycles,” Mr. Crichton said. “It brings you into a corner of the world that you really didn’t know existed and it lights it up.”