Rebecca Blumenstein & Diana Kapp
Authors, The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America
This episode will premiere September 3, 2026 at 7:00pm ET
“Leadership is using your own platform to help others along, to help them use their voices and have their stories told.”
Summary
When Kabul fell in August 2021, the world watched. The crowds at the airport, the desperation, the tragedy at Abbey Gate — for a few weeks, it was the only story anyone was following. Then it receded. For many, this was the closing of a difficult chapter of history; but for many Afghans who fled abroad to escape the Taliban, it was the opening of a new one.
On this episode of Leadership Matters, I sat down with Rebecca Blumenstein, president of editorial at NBC News, and Diana Kapp, a journalist and author whose reporting has taken her from San Quentin to rural Afghanistan. Rebecca and Diana are longtime friends, and together, the two have authored The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America. The book follows four young women — Marwa, Mursal, Maryam, and Samira — from the airlift into their new lives in the United States after The New York Times, where Rebecca was then serving as deputy managing director, decided to evacuate not just its correspondents but the entire Kabul bureau and their families. Doing this successfully was no mean feat: it required remarkable acts of kindness and leadership from a long chain of strangers from Qatar to Mexico. It also required a daunting degree of courage from the women at the center of its story, who had mere minutes to pack everything they owned before taking the plunge into the unknown.
At a time when America sometimes seems to be irreparably divided, Rebecca and Diana make a compelling case that human stories like this one are capable of bringing people together — and that the generosity they describe is far more common than the headlines suggest.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bios
Rebecca Blumenstein
Rebecca Blumenstein is President, Editorial of NBC News, where she manages newsgathering and operations around the world, digital and flagship shows including NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press and Dateline. From 2017 to 2023, she was a Deputy Managing Editor at The New York Times and worked closely with New York Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger as Deputy Editor, Publisher’s Office. She spent 22 years as a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, rising to Deputy Editor-in-Chief. She led the China team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. She was named chair of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review in August 2022 and was named to the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship in 2009.
Diana Kapp
Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces. Her longform pieces have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, More, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Marie Claire, among other publications. She is the author of two YA books profiling female changemakers, Girls Who Run the World and Girls Who Green the World.