Caliphate Host Rukmini Callimachi Once Hoped to Be a Poet

The Cut talks to journalist Rukmini Callimachi, the host of the wave-making NYT podcast Caliphate. Big reveal: Callimachi used to be a poet! "I always knew that I wanted to write. Initially I made the mistake of thinking that writing is this profession that I would do in a solitary form. Very early on, I thought that I was going to become a poet," she tells Lisa Ryan. More:

...I got somewhat down that pipeline. I was able to publish over a dozen poems in various national and local journals, but I realized that I didn’t like being completely by myself in a room — when you’re a poet, it’s you and your inner world. What I really loved to do was talking to people and traveling, and it really didn’t fit into place until I was in India as part of my graduate studies. I was at that point studying Sanskrit at Oxford University. There, I realized, Oh my god, journalism puts these three things together. So I dropped out of my graduate program in late 2000, and in 2001 there was a major earthquake in Gujarat, which is a state in western India. I was able to get on one of the first flights going from New Delhi to Gujarat, and I was able to file my first story as a contributor on a Time magazine article about the earthquake.

On becoming a terrorism expert: I got into covering terrorism in 2012. At that point, I was the West Africa bureau chief for the AP. I was in Senegal, but I covered a stretch of 20 countries in the area, including Mali. In 2012, an affiliate of Al Qaeda took over northern Mali and did what we later saw ISIS doing in Raqqa and Mosul. That became an important part of my beat, and in 2013, I was able to get into Timbuktu right after it was liberated. There, I found thousands of pages of internal Al Qaeda documents which pretty much blew up my world and opened this beat to me.

Read it all at The Cut.