Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017. Gessen is the author of nine books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017; and “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and the New York Times. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about AIDS, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, Gessen was dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes. Gessen is a visiting professor at Amherst College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013.
Reading List: Masha Gessen recommends Rachel Aviv’s “The Trauma of Facing Deportation,” about refugee children in Sweden.
Listen: Masha Gessen discusses “The Future Is History” with Tom Ashbrook:
All Work
- Our Columnists
Putin Lied About His Nuclear Doctrine and Promised Russians That They Would Go to Heaven
The Russian President’s speech is always a demonstration of the emptiness of words—his own and other people’s. The only thing that matters is power.
October 19, 2018
- Our Columnists
Elizabeth Warren Falls for Trump’s Trap—and Promotes Insidious Ideas About Race and DNA
Warren is reinforcing an insidious way in which Americans talk about race: as though it were a measurable biological category, one that, in some cases, can be determined by a single drop of blood.
October 16, 2018
- Our Columnists
One Year of #MeToo: Punishing Individual Abusers Is Not the Same as Justice
If there is anything the past year has taught us, it’s that it is impossible to punish all the powerful men who abuse women.
October 10, 2018
- Our Columnists
A New Book Explores Protesting as an Act of Faith
A slim volume by the organizer L. A. Kauffman argues that the women’s marches of 2017 didn’t just help shape and fuel a movement—they actually created one.
October 8, 2018
- Our Columnists
The Fifteen-Year-Old Climate Activist Who Is Demanding a New Kind of Politics
Greta Thunberg’s protest outside of Sweden’s parliament building has made climate change a topic of that country’s daily conversation.
October 2, 2018
- Our Columnists
Fleeing Anti-Gay Persecution in Chechnya, Three Young Women Are Now Stuck in Place
If they are found, they will be in danger, but they have nowhere else to go.
October 1, 2018
- Our Columnists
Christine Blasey Ford, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Death of Dignity in Politics
In being so undignified, Kavanaugh—and Trump—are saying that power is raw, never shared, and never contingent.
September 28, 2018
- Our Columnists
The United States and Sweden Share an Approach to Shutting Out Immigrants
Both countries are closing down borders and excluding immigrants from the welfare state.
September 25, 2018
- Our Columnists
We Now Know More About the Apparent Poisoning of the Pussy Riot Member Pyotr Verzilov
Verzilov had worked with three Russian journalists who were killed in the Central African Republic while reporting on a mercenary force linked to a close associate of President Vladimir Putin.
September 19, 2018
- Our Columnists
A Triumphant Primary Night for Julia Salazar and the D.S.A. in Brooklyn
Salazar’s campaign discovered something that the American President has known for a long time: communicating with people directly, whether by Twitter or by going door to door, takes precedence over anything that’s reported in the media.
September 14, 2018
