The Atlantic.com article is a book review of "A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging." It is also about a journalist specialized in migration and journalism.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/02/map-of-future-ruins-lauren-markham-book-review/677407/

"Markham’s book is about the contemporary migration crisis. As of 2022, some 100 million people around the world have fled war, persecution, and instability in their home countries for uncertain futures in others.
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Markham believes that attitudes toward migration often contain an element of contradiction—for instance, when some Americans see their own family’s immigrant background as a source of pride, while at the same time rejecting the right of others to, similarly, make a new life in a new country. She suggests that by identifying and exposing hypocrisies like these, prejudice against migrants might also fall away.
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The story of the six Afghans on trial provides a thread that runs through Markham’s book—and is its strongest element. ... Her description of life at Moria, and especially the night of the fire, through Ali’s eyes, is a feat of reconstructive reportage, poetically written: “This was smoke, but nothing like the smell of a cook fire or a woodpile burning; it was the stench of human things on fire, things that weren’t meant to burn.” The twists and turns in Ali’s trial reveal how a young refugee accused of a crime in a foreign country has little recourse, and Markham does a great service in exposing the shadowy, punitive systems he faced.
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Markham’s probing and at times murky explorations sometimes seem to be the point of the book. ...She also notes that news and magazine stories about migration are often dominated by linear accounts, in which a migrant flees desperate conditions and either triumphantly attains refuge or is cruelly denied it.

Markham wants journalists to resist these expectations and tell stories that challenge familiar narratives. It’s an intriguing idea: Upended narratives might force people to question common assumptions about migration, to identify creative solutions they have not yet thought of and cast off pieties to which they cling.
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Markham argues that expanding and complicating the most typical migrant narratives will help us “co-construct new, less ruinous storylines, new forms of belonging beyond borders.” But her discovery of her own family’s history doesn’t yield insight on how to do so. While reading A Map of Future Ruins, I was reminded of one of my journalism students, who is himself Afghan. Looking up from some magazine articles I had assigned—ones that melded memoir with explanatory reporting—he said angrily: “What is the point of these magazine stories?” He believed journalism was supposed to say what happened, what mistakes were made and by whom, and what needs to be fixed. Many young people I’ve talked with, anxious about their own fate, long for writing that doesn’t necessarily offer tangible solutions but at least provides hard, factual fodder for them. They look for damning and fulsome descriptions of the cruel and inadequate systems they are navigating, and a glimpse of what’s needed for their fast-arriving future. Markham shouldn’t lose faith in her reportorial powers—there will be many millions more people in need of the close attention of journalists like her.."