Katie Engelhart Joins the Magazine

I'm thrilled to announce that Katie Engelhart is joining the Magazine as a staff writer.

As a contributor, Katie had written one extraordinary story after another for the Magazine. Last month, she published a gut-wrenching feature about adult caregivers who find themselves caring for elderly parents who were abusive. Her 2022 feature, " The Mother Who Changed ," which won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, was a complex portrait of a family's legal and emotional struggles during a matriarch's progressive dementia that led the reader to inhabit all the perspectives of this tragic drama.

Like so many of Katie's pieces, these two stories tackled issues related to aging, illness, and the legal, ethical and medical questions that surround the end of life. This is a subject of intense interest to our readers, not only because it touches on something we all face - aging and dying - but also because our society is reckoning with it in all sorts of new ways that have to do with advances in science, new frontiers in the law, and the dramatic increase in the share of the American population over 65 (due to declining birth rates, increased life expectancy and the aging of the baby boomers). For years now, Katie has dedicated herself to becoming an expert in this zone of coverage. She's written about the right to die, (both in a 2025 piece about the complicated nature of Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying law and a 2024 piece about a woman with severe anorexia for whom treatment had been ineffective). Earlier this year, she wrote about the new science into the consciousness of people in so-called vegetative states .

Katie will continue to explore this terrain, and she will also write more generally about related topics in health, law, politics and society. A former graduate student of history and philosophy at Oxford University, she brings a deep intellectual rigor to her reporting, but she's equally skilled at drawing out the compelling human dramas that animate a great narrative. Her stories immerse readers in the complexities of life; they make us feel and think and talk to our families and friends about what we just read.

As we push into new formats, Katie also has experience that will come in handy. She worked as a documentary film correspondent at NBC News, appearing on "The Today Show" and "NBC Nightly News," and served as a correspondent for Vice News and Maclean's. She's the author of the critically acclaimed 2021 book "The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die," which The New Yorker called a "remarkably nuanced, empathetic and well-crafted work of journalism." Before her time with our magazine, she wrote for California Sunday.

We are lucky to have her joining us full-time, starting on Sept. 1. Please join me in welcoming her to the Magazine.

- Jake