Daniel Pearl, an American Wall Street Journal correspondent, was defined not by his tragic 2002 murder but by a life anchored in cross-cultural understanding and the relentless pursuit of objective truth. Raised in a globally connected family whose relatives were saved by Muslim neighbors during a 1941 Baghdad massacre, he rejected binary us-versus-them thinking.

A meticulous reporter who tore the casing off official narratives, Pearl once disproved his own government's claims about a Sudan missile strike, showing the target was a civilian pharmaceutical factory. Investigating militant networks in Karachi after 9/11, he was abducted and killed, but his defiant assertion of his identity turned terror into a global conversation.

• At Stanford he co-founded a student newspaper and worked on the campus radio station.
• His captor ...