Mr.

Crichton, a deputy international editor in The Times’s London office, took over the
column soon after it began in 2002, and has since shaped it into the weekly staple that it
is today.
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“The animating idea of it was to highlight people that you might never really see in the
big news cycles,” Mr. Crichton said. “It brings you into a corner of the world that you
really didn’t know existed and it lights it up.”

More than 700 people are cataloged in The Saturday Profile’s lineup, and writers and
editors posted all over the world have contributed.

The Times’s Brussels correspondent, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, typically covers the

European Union. But recently she wrote a Saturday Profile about her neighbor, Simon
Gronowski, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in attics for 17 months. In April, when
Brussels shuttered itself against the first wave of the coronavirus, Mr. Gronowski was
moved by memories to play piano out of his window.

“My backyard and his backyard face each other, so I’d never met him, I’d never seen him
around in the neighborhood,” Ms. Stevis-Gridneff said. “And then of course we were
locked in so we didn’t really see anyone around anyway.”