"If you want to get a letter out of a Burmese prison, do not give it to the guards."

It's sage advice from someone who knows, Danny Fenster, a journalist who spent six months in Insein prison after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar (the one that unfolded behind a woman's fitness instruction video). A decade before that, he was my student.

Danny chronicles his time in prison—the hopelessness and hope, the stress and boredom—in a beautiful, harrowing, evocative biographic comic he wrote in collaboration with illustrator Amy Kurzweil for the tech-and-culture website The Verge. I can not urge you enough to go read it.

Scrolling through the story, you learn what led Danny from the US to Myanmar, you see early moments of budding love with his now-wife Juliana, you witness the coup through their eyes, you watch ants crawl up the walls of prison alongside Danny, and you feel his joy when he first hears Juliana's voice in prison via a smuggled SD card. It's a remarkable piece of reporting and storytelling, one that resonates especially poignantly right now.

In what feels like another lifetime or two (or three) ago, I taught journalism at Columbia College Chicago. Danny was a student, bright and curious, a little more quiet and contemplative than most of the kids that passed through. That was 15 years ago now. Over the years I've kept in touch with a few students, largely over social media, coupled with the occasional DM or email. Danny was one of them. He'd drop a line, letting me know what he was up to. Last I'd heard from him, he was in Louisiana I think.

I still remember clicking on an article about a journalist who had been taken prisoner in Myanmar and the feeling in my stomach when I read Danny's name. I did what I could while he was inside to try and keep his story going: pressing Columbia to issue a statement, reaching out to a connection high up at the State Department (repeatedly), talking to reporters, and doing TV news spots. It never felt like enough. Days turned into weeks turned into months.

In November 2021, just after being sentenced to 11 years in prison, Danny was released thanks to the work of former ambassador Bill Richardson, who devoted the tail end of his life to helping to free political prisoners. He came back to the states, got a fellowship at Harvard (where I randomly ran into him on the street while touring campus with my kid), and is contemplating the question that so many of us have asked lately: what's next. For himself, for the country, for all of us. We had pizza a couple months ago, and I kept telling him to tell his story.

I think I've written "right now is very hard," or a variation of that phrase, more than a dozen times in the last year, but right now is very hard. One thing that helps me is to read about folks who have been through hard things and made it out the other side. Knowing that survival is possible, that even in the most hopeless of situations you can still find hope, is the key to making it through. Or, as Danny puts it so wonderfully: The lesson is to keep reporting anyway, to record for tomorrow the stories that today's victors would prefer we forget.

So please, on this dreary Sunday, the latest in a long line of dreary Sundays, give Danny's story the time it deserves.