“It might tell you something about the human condition, it might make you laugh, it

might make you cry, it might give you hope or despair,” she continued with a chuckle.
“Hopefully not too much despair.”

Simon Romero, who was The Times’s Andean bureau chief and Brazil bureau chief
before anchoring in New Mexico as a national correspondent, wrote more than two
dozen Saturday Profiles as he crossed South America.

“It’s a way to write an article about a place in a different kind of format,” Mr. Romero
said. “You can tell the story of a place through one person’s story.”