I joined the desk in November 2023, and it has been a revelation to me that to merit a New York Times obituary, you don’t have to be a household name. So many people I didn’t know of or knew just glancingly led fascinating lives. They set the world spinning slightly differently — by negotiating an environmental treaty, by breaking barriers as a Black military officer, or by winning a landmark legal case that gave undocumented migrants the right to go to public schools. One of the pleasures of the beat is writing about people from all walks of life and all points of the ideological compass.
My Background
I was national correspondent on the Politics desk and covered the presidential elections of 2012, 2016, 2020 and part of 2024. I focused particularly on voters. I lived in Iowa for all of 2015 in the run-up to its fabled caucuses. I have also been the Mid-Atlantic bureau chief and a national education reporter. Before that, I was the founding editor of the Sunday Styles and Thursday Styles sections and oversaw them for 12 years. I conceived the “Modern Love” column in 2004, but credit for its juggernaut success — including spinoff books, a podcast and a television show — belongs to its longtime editor, Daniel Jones.
Before joining The Times in 1994, I wrote for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Outside and Sports Illustrated.
Journalistic Ethics
As a reporter for The New York Times, I am committed to upholding the standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook. Just because your subjects are dead doesn’t mean they don’t deserve your fullest effort to be objective and evenhanded.
The first woman to serve as the paper’s national editor, she focused on issues of race, class and poverty, drawing prizes, and rose to the newsroom’s top echelon.
With an emphasis on younger viewers, he established the networks as serious rivals to ABC, CBS and NBC, which had ruled television for nearly 40 years.
He had success on the rugby pitch and in boardrooms, building a media empire and boosting Heinz’s profits, but his fortunes buckled in the global financial crisis.
She made significant contributions at IBM, but she lost her job because of her conviction that she inhabited the wrong body. She later fought for transgender rights.
The small chain that he, a brother and a third partner opened in 1963 had become the nation’s largest by the time he retired as its chief executive three decades later.
After an academic career spent in near obscurity, he became an internet phenomenon during the pandemic by uploading talks he had given three decades earlier.
He brought a P.T. Barnum-like showmanship to Sotheby’s, where he sold items like Babe Ruth’s bat and a research rover that had been left behind on the moon.
He was the first Black officer to lead a Marine Corps infantry company into combat. He later became an Alabama state lawmaker and an assistant secretary of the Air Force.
His nine-day voyage, in a plane designed by his brother that resembled a child’s glider but had wings longer than a Boeing 727’s, made aviation history.
He wrote a popular series of books revolving around a hunchbacked detective, Shardlake, whose troubles echo the author’s experiences of childhood bullying.
He won the right to services like school and health care for people illegally crossing the border into the U.S. He also fought the Trump administration’s family separation policy.
The first woman on the faculty of Yale Law School, she was named to the State Supreme Court in 1978 and became its first female chief justice six years later.
A pastor’s wife, she formed Concerned Women for America to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Ronald Reagan called her “one of the powerhouses on the political scene.”
He negotiated Mr. Simpson’s star turn in commercials, tapping into his football fame, and formed a social bond with him — until there were murder charges. They died on the same day.
He was arrested protesting war and clashed with fellow bishops in supporting gay marriage and the ordination of women and championing victims of sex abuse by priests.
He played a key role in securing the Montreal Protocol, an international environmental pact to protect the ozone layer by reducing the use of certain chemicals.
He was one of the prosecuted Panther 21 in New York, and his account of abuse in jail was a catalyst for Leonard Bernstein’s famous Park Avenue fund-raising party.
He drew on his own painful experiences with a stutter in depicting King George VI’s struggles to overcome his impediment and rally Britain in World War II.
He persuaded Ronald Reagan to help defeat a proposed ban on L.G.B.T.Q. schoolteachers in California in 1978, and he sparred with his friend Bill Clinton over “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
A physician, scientist and academic, he brought together experts across disciplines to focus on the economic, political and social causes of poor health, not just the biological factors.
A longtime investigative journalist, he wrote books and articles that documented a campaign of disinformation intended to sow doubt about global warming.
While serving as a judge in Seattle, he was inspired to start an organization to help children who did not have unbiased advocates in court proceedings.
On the air, he urged politically powerful guests to take action on human rights issues. Outside the studio, he joined protests, including a hunger strike in 2021.
Despite being wounded multiple times, he led the defense of a jungle outpost against a Vietcong assault, inspiring his smaller force to “superhuman effort.”
As solicitor general under Reagan, he argued against abortion rights and affirmative action. But he came to see the current Supreme Court as “reactionary, not conservative.”
The American Family Association, which he founded, became a juggernaut in the Christian right’s campaign against sex and gay themes in art, television and pop culture.
An eminent civil rights lawyer, he was one of the nation’s foremost experts on abusive policing. He also successfully challenged New York’s Cabaret Law.
A psychiatrist and a prolific author, he criticized what he referred to as a “nonsystem” that left vulnerable people on the streets to fend for themselves.
She was originally a supporter of the uprising that brought her brother to power. But she grew disillusioned, worked undercover for the C.I.A. and later fled the island.
He worked for the passage of major public health legislation; most notably, he helped secure millions in federal dollars for research into sudden infant death syndrome.
He led a popular religious revival and a megachurch, but his peers and congregation abandoned him once he questioned core doctrine and advocated gay rights.
A widely read financial analyst, he was known for his annual forecast “Ten Surprises.” But he was fallible, as when he predicted a President Hillary Clinton.
The state’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, has a strategy to win the state. If it halts Democrats’ momentum on the issue, it could be a model for the party in 2024.
Mike Pence has still not resolved some of the contradictions at the core of his candidacy, and his campaign has struggled with financial problems, including running up a debt of $620,000.
The Nobles of Iowa moved to blue Minnesota. The Huckinses of Oregon moved to red Missouri. Their separate journeys, five weeks apart, illustrate the fracturing of America.
Ryan Bizzarro, a Democrat and member of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives, announced a bid to challenge the Republican incumbent, Stacy Garrity, by invoking issues galvanizing to Democrats.
Democratic voters far from the border say they want leaders to do more to address the growing number of migrants in their cities, but they don’t agree on what.
The president has highlighted his pro-union credentials, but inflation has eroded blue-collar livelihoods and chilled support for the president on the picket lines.