The civil war rages on, and the foreign correspondent Allan Little watches as a procession of forty thousand civilians emerges from a forest. They've been trudging through the woods for forty-eight hours straight, fleeing an attack. Among them is an eighty-year-old man. He looks desperate, exhausted. The man approaches Little, asking whether he's seen his wife. They were separated during the long march, the man says. Little hasn't seen her but, ever the journalist, asks whether the man wouldn't mind identifying himself as Muslim or Croat. And the man's answer, Little says years later, in a gorgeous BBC segment, shames him even now, as he recalls it across decades. "I am," said the old man, "a musician.

Bittersweet by Susan Cain