Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. The magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, she covers politics, culture, and national security. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent. She is the author of four best-selling books, including “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” which the Times named as one of the ten best books of 2016, and which began as a 2010 New Yorker piece about the Koch brothers’ deep influence on American politics. She also wrote the 2008 Times best-seller “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” a finalist for the National Book Award, which was based on her New Yorker articles and was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and one of the ten best books of the year by the Times. She is a co-author, with Jill Abramson, of “Strange Justice,” also a finalist for the National Book Award, and, with Doyle McManus, of “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988.”

In 2009, Mayer was chosen as Princeton University’s Ferris Professor of Journalism. Her numerous honors include the George Polk Award, the John Chancellor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, two Helen Bernstein Book Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social-justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, the Frances Perkins Intelligence and Courage Award, the Nellie Bly Award for Investigative Reporting, the Mirror Award for the “single best article” on the media in 2020, and, most recently, the First Amendment Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Mayer has served as a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. In 2022, she was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hall of Fame. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.