Dan Pearl - Early Life

Early Life

Daniel Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in the upscale Encino district of Los Angeles, California, where he attended Portola Middle School and Birmingham High School. His father, Judea Pearl, is currently a professor of Computer Science and Statistics, director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, and a Turing Award recipient. His mother Ruth is of Iraqi Jewish descent. The history of the family and its connections to Israel are described by Judea Pearl in the LA Times article, "Roots in the Holy Land".

Danny, as he was known throughout his life, attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he stood out as a Communications major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, a co-founder of a student newspaper called the Stanford Commentator, as well as a reporter for the campus radio station, KZSU. Pearl graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in Communications, after which he spent a summer as a Pulliam Fellow intern at The Indianapolis Star, and a winter bussing tables as a ski bum in Idaho. Following a trip to the then-Soviet Union, China and Europe, he joined the North Adams Transcript and The Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts, then moved on to the San Francisco Business Times.

Pearl began at the Wall Street Journal's Atlanta bureau in 1990, moving to the Washington, D.C., bureau in 1993 to cover telecommunications, and then to the London bureau in 1996. He wrote articles such as the October 1994 story of a Stradivarius violin allegedly found on a highway on-ramp, and a June 2000 story about Iranian pop music. His most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkans, where he discovered that charges of one alleged genocide committed in Kosovo were unsubstantiated, and the American missile attack on a supposed military facility in Khartoum, which he proved to be a pharmaceutical factory.

Later, he met and married Mariane Van Neyenhoff. Their son, Adam Daniel Pearl, was born in Paris, France on May 28, 2002, almost four months after Pearl's death.