Timothy Noah

Timothy Noah is a staff writer for the New Republic and maintains the Substack newsletter Backbencher . This is Noah's third tour of duty at the New Republic. He began his journalism career there in 1980 as a summer intern and later staff writer; came back in 2011 to write the "TRB" column; then returned in 2021.

In between, Noah was a Washington-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal, an assistant managing editor for U.S. News & World Report, a congressional correspondent for Newsweek, an editor on the New York Times op-ed page, an editor of the Washington Monthly (to which he's also returned from time to time), and labor policy editor for Politico.

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Noah has written for a variety of other national publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time, and the New York Review of Books, and he's contributed frequent broadcast commentaries to CBS Sunday Morning and NPR's Day To Day.

 

He received the 2011 Hillman Prize for a 10-part Slate series on income inequality in the U.S. that he subsequently expanded into his 2012 book, The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis And What We Can Do About It. Noah was also, in 2010, a National Magazine Award finalist for his Slate coverage of Obamacare.

 

Noah edited two anthologies of the writings of his late first wife, Marjorie Williams:  the New York Times best-seller The Woman At The Washington Zoo (2005), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Reputation (2008).

 

A 1980 graduate of Harvard College, Noah lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Sarah McNamer, a professor of English and Medieval Studies at Georgetown University, and (depending on the time of year) up to four of their mostly-grown children and stepchildren.