Alumni Q&A: Jeffrey Stern ’03

Would you by chance be able to push our interview just a bit? Got pulled into a thing with the Afghanistan internet blackout.

This is the kind of email you might get when corresponding with Jeffrey Stern ’03, an award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker who has spent much of his career covering stories in Afghanistan and neighboring countries in the Middle East. His focus is often on individual narratives, which—through specificity, detail, and rigorous research—shine a light on broader human rights issues.

Stern has lent his sharp storytelling skills to major news organizations like CNN, PBS News Hour, NPR’s Morning Edition, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. His work has been recognized with awards, such as the Amnesty International Award for Foreign Reporting, and an honorable mention for Best Book of the Year by Library Journal. Stern has also been named a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation and a grantee of the Pulitzer Center Fellow for Crisis Reporting. 

He’s the author of five books, one of which (The 15:17 to Paris) was adapted as a major motion picture by Clint Eastwood and Warner Brothers. Stern’s newest book, The Warhead: The Quest to Build the Perfect Weapon in the Age of Modern Warfare was released on January 20, 2026, by Penguin Random House. 

Despite the power outage that derailed our initial interview, we were eventually able to speak with Stern about his new book, his humanitarian work with 30 Birds Foundation and The Bamyan Foundation, and how he found his way into his career, among other things.

Congrats on the new book! What is The Warhead about and what inspired you to write it?

Jeffrey Stern: The idea for the book started with a story I wrote in 2018 for The New York Times Magazine, which traces the journey of a bomb from being manufactured in Arizona to its detonation in Yemen. In researching the story, I learned that these laser-guided smart bombs, called Paveway, were invented by Texas Instruments. I didn't even know that company made bombs—I thought they just made calculators. 

The Warhead was a way to dig into the 70-year history of Paveway, which I now realize is the most important precision-guided weapon in the American arsenal; its invention helped usher in the era of modern warfare with precision weapons, like drone strikes. The book is basically a non-fiction novel of nested stories. The bomb itself is anthropomorphized, and it becomes a character that moves through seven semi-contained narratives ranging from the Nazis, to the Kennedys, to Walt Disney. 

Can you take us back to the beginning of your journalism career? How did you get started, and how and why did you end up in Afghanistan?

The short version is that I wanted to be a journalist but I didn’t have a conventional portfolio. I developed this idea that if I was reporting from a relevant place in the world, maybe the fact that no one knew me wouldn’t matter as much. From what I understood, you couldn't really wing it in Iraq; you couldn't go without being embedded. I was a bit familiar with Afghanistan from an internship I had with CNN during my senior year of college working on a documentary covering parts of the Middle East and South Asia. So in 2007, I went to Afghanistan, and ultimately, it was a gamble that paid off.

I began publishing some things, but I wasn’t making enough money to live there. I met a few Afghans and Westerners fairly quickly, and I ended up getting a low-level position at the American University in Afghanistan that provided some housing and a stipend. That became my day job. 

That sounds like going from 0 to 60, in terms of journalism. How did you figure out which stories to pursue and how to tell them?

It was definitely diving into the deep end of journalism, but a few things made it a little easier for me. First, the human drama and reasons for covering the stories were pretty self-evident; I didn’t have to struggle to figure out why people should read these stories. 

Second, because I wasn’t there on behalf of any bureau, I wasn't really responsible for delivering the basics. I had no access to anyone important so my beat became everyday people in Afghanistan. I developed the instinct that stories should be less about how to get the politicians and generals to give a quote, and more about: How are the people here? And looking at them not as two-dimensional anecdotes, but as the whole story. That became my ethos and approach to all storytelling. 

How long did you end up staying there?

I was there for a year initially, with a break of a few months back home in the middle. I went back for a few shorter trips after that. And then was just finishing grad school when President Obama started talking about pulling all troops out of Afghanistan. A dear friend was heading up a co-ed school there and the U.S. pulling out would put them at risk. So I went back to live there and work on what became The Last Thousand, a book about the school preparing for a very uncertain future, and the open questions about girls' education in Afghanistan. While writing, rewriting, and editing, I began doing some other crisis and conflict reporting for various publications.

So there are lots of places in the region where I've spent a few weeks, but Afghanistan is the one place where I’ve spent years. Of all these different places I've been lucky enough to adventure, Afghanistan is the one that for better or worse is almost like a second home. 

Many of your stories are about people whose lives have been affected by violence, terror, and war. How do you process the heaviness of that?

For me, sometimes the horror makes it easier to find the grace. No one is just a victim. And that’s not just helpful for me as a human being, but I think is practically helpful as a writer—it’s easier to find the light in these very dark stories, because it’s usually in such stark relief.

And I’ve been pretty lucky to have been invited into a few organizations where people are trying to address some of the horrors in ways beyond just documenting them and hoping they change. 

What are these organizations, and what’s your role in them? 

One is 30 Birds Foundation, which I helped co-found with a group of friends in the early summer of 2021. This is when the Biden administration began talking about pulling troops out of Afghanistan, putting a lot of people at risk, including the friend who ran the co-ed school. We tried to get him and his family out in normal ways, like through think tank jobs or professorships. But we ended up having to run an extraction on the day Kabul fell, and got the family out using a complex plan that included members of the intelligence community, Marines, an Army General, a political officer, and other contacts inside the airport compound. 

But most of us were getting hundreds of messages a day from people who wanted to get out of Afghanistan, so we turned this into an effort to do that through a Canadian government refugee program. We found a way to smuggle a few hundred girls into Pakistan—really the girls evacuated themselves—and got about half of them out. But others required private sponsorship, so we became a foundation because we essentially had to in order to raise money. So far, 30 Birds has helped evacuate and resettle over 450 girls, their families, educators, and other activists into Canada. Now we have a really extraordinary staff, and I’m just a founding board member who shows up to take credit for stuff. 

The other organization is the Bamyan Foundation, a small, nimble group raising money for scholarships for girls’ education and other at-risk groups and communities in Afghanistan. I’m the vice president of the board of directors. 

How did your GFS education prepare you for your career? 

My English teachers helped me see past the stereotype of the tortured creative writer. They made writing feel like a fun laboratory to explore. 

And because of my education at GFS, I think I took for granted that if there's some effort worth getting involved in, there will be people who will raise their hand and help guide you. Any independently-minded thing, whether a charitable endeavor or way-out-of-left field project, I just assumed people would step up to help because that’s always what I experienced at GFS.