Beyond the Rope

Featuring:  Kristen Mulvihill and David Rohde
Recorded:  June 2011, New York, NY
Music:  Ryan Rumery

In November 2008, while in Afghanistan writing a book on the region, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Rohde was abducted by Taliban gunmen.  At the time, he had been married only two months, to Cosmopolitan photography director Kristen Mulvihill.  Seven months later, after being moved from Logar Province to the tribal areas of Pakistan, after multiple videos depicting Rohde's captivity and a string of dead-end negotiations, Rodhe and his Afghan colleague Tahir Ludin escaped from the compound in which they were held.  Days later, Rohde was reunited with Mulvihill in Dubai, and within a week the two were back home in New York City.  In December 2009, the two began work on a book about their experiences during the period.  The resulting narrative, A Rope and a Prayer, was published in November 2010.  During the months that followed, on tour and elsewhere, Rohde and Mulvihill relived details of their ordeal for audiences both awestruck and enraged by what they had to say.

Kristen Mulvihill loves to tell stories with images and words. She is a content creator and editor with exprience in print, tv, digital media at Hearst, Condé Nast, The Food Network, Sarah Laird Agency; a coding newbie, curiously exploring where art meets code; an author and an advocate, a founder of the non-profit Hostage US; and eager to use her experience as an illustrator, writer, collaborator to engage, inform, inspire and give back. She is a graduate of Brown Univesity, a proud mom of two girls and thankful member of the inaugural NYC Mother Coders cohort.

David Rohde is the Senior Executive Editor for National Security at NBC News. He is a former executive editor of the NewYorker.com and reporter for Reuters, The New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, in 1996, for stories that helped expose the Srebrenica massacre during the war in Bosnia, and, in 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with a team of Times reporters for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the author of four books, most recently, In Deep: The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Truth About America's 'Deep State. His other books include: Beyond War: Reimagining America's Role and Ambitions in a New Middle East; A Rope and a Prayer: The Story of a Kidnapping (co-authored with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill); and Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II. He lives in New York with Kristen and two daughters. David serves on the board of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.