For the latest edition of “Life in Pictures,” 43-year-old Samantha Power, United States ambassador to the United Nations, allowed photographer Stephanie Sinclair to follow her around Midtown East on March 13. Scroll ahead for a day filled with baseball talk, kid-ferrying, and Ukraine-crisis management.
8:25 a.m. My kids are 4 and 1: Declan and Rian. We have a large, ornate dining room for the ambassador’s residence. It’s not a great room for flying scrambled eggs, so we have a small table with my daughter’s high chair. The BlackBerry sits there, too, I’m afraid.
8:32 a.m. I take my son to school and my daughter to day care on the way to work. It’s a busy day job. Ukraine has been intense.
8:42 a.m. I wanted to use the platform of the U.N. to show Russia’s isolation, to mobilize other countries to take a strong position in opposition to what Russia was doing. [Russia would take over Crimea several days later.] But every day begins with a quick meeting with my team, then we do a tour of the world.
8:46 a.m. Declan is in preschool. He is excited about baseball, baseball, and baseball. His only incentive to learn to read is to be able to read the names on the backs of the jerseys.
4:50 p.m. I sit next to María [Perceval], Argentina’s ambassador. There are five women on the Security Council, 30 total. Madeleine Albright called her group of women ambassadors the G7. I call mine the G30.
6:53 p.m. We had a really powerful General Assembly of 100 not long after this, where Russia was isolated with Venezuela, Sudan, Syria: the actors who are not themselves poster children for human rights or international law.
7:35 p.m. This was a really cool event where a number of the U.N. ambassadors came to me and said, “Is there any chance you could introduce us to de Blasio?” They really are entranced by him. And, of course, he’s a fellow Red Sox fan living in New York City, so we compared notes about what that was like. The trials of it.
8:08 p.m. I’ve come to appreciate, with the tyranny of the email in-box, how important thank-you notes are. If there’s an activist out there who’s doing great work, sure, I can tweet, but it means more if I write a note. But I have the penmanship of someone who’s written emails her whole life.
8:17 p.m. I’m sprinting to get home before my daughter goes to bed, then heading to meet my husband [Cass Sunstein] for dinner. He’s teaching in Boston, so he only comes back on Thursdays. We talk about the book he’s written that week; he is the most prolific man on Earth. And whatever Security Council resolution I’m working on. But there are limits to what I can share.
*This article appears in the April 21, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.
