Bill Wasik is the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine.
Latest by this author
Nineteenth-century activists revolutionized attitudes toward nonhuman animals amid cultural, economic, and moral shifts in a rapidly changing nation.
By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy in Animals | Earth Food Life Project and Human Bridges Project | English | February 3, 2025
More about this author
Bill Wasik is the editorial director of the New York Times Magazine. He is the co-author, with Monica Murphy, of Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals (2024, Knopf Doubleday) and Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus (2013, Penguin Random House), which is a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
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How P.T. Barnum Brought Beluga Whales to New York City
Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on Museum Ethics and Animal Welfare in 19th Century America
Co-authors: Monica Murphy | Lit Hub | April | 2024
The authors describe how the American showman developed a fascination for whales and became determined to exploit their rarity and attractiveness:
“As with his other animal attractions, Barnum seemed to relish the challenges of capturing and conveying the whales to New York—elaborately griping to reporters about the hardships and expenses he suffered in the effort, reinforcing the rarity and value of the animals to a breathless public eager for new amusements.”
Seth Mnookin Takes on Jenny McCarthy & Co.
Observer | December | 2011
Wasick reviews The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookinʼs definitive, infuriating history of the myth that vaccines cause autism.
Or, Phase 5: A Report from the Inventor of the Flash Mob
Harperʼs Magazine | March | 2006
Wasick details how he helped organize the first flash mobs, originally as a form of social experiment.
Publications by this author
How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals
Co-authors: Monica Murphy | Alfred A. Knopf and Doubleday | April | 2024
Over just a few decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States underwent a moral revolution on behalf of animals. Before the Civil War, animals’ suffering had rarely been discussed; horses pulling carriages and carts were routinely beaten in public view, and dogs were pitted against each other for entertainment and gambling. But in 1866, a group of activists began a dramatic campaign to change the nation’s laws and norms, and by the century’s end, most Americans had adopted a very different way of thinking and feeling about the animals in their midst.
A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus
Co-authors: Monica Murphy | Penguin Random House | June | 2013
The most fatal virus known to science, rabies—a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans—kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration from the authors of Our Kindred Creatures, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies.
From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind’s oldest and most fearsome foes.How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
Penguin Random House | August | 2010
From the co-author of Our Kindred Creatures and Rabid, journalist and new media provocateur Bill Wasik journeys to the edge of our churning and rambunctious viral culture to illuminate how anyone with a computer can initiate a small ripple of a story that can turn into a tsunami. While exploring this fascinating landscape, Wasik (who organized the very first flash mob in 2003) conducts six experiments himself. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in journalism, business, technology, and how cultural information spreads. Wasik’s tour is great, stimulating and fun.
Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper’s Magazine
Co-authors: Roger D. Hodge, William T. Vollmann, Wells Tower, Willem Marx and Jay Kirk | The New Press | September | 2008
“Submersion journalism” happens when a reporter dares to see a story from the inside: to participate in the events at hand, sometimes undercover, and then to tell the tale from a distinct point of view rather than pretend to some ideal of objectivity. During the Bush years, Harper’s correspondents infiltrated the Republican machine, from its lowliest canvassing operation to its corporate and evangelical elite, and they posed as shady clients for sleazy blue-chip lobbying firms. They shot machine guns, lounged in Vegas brothels, and peered into secret tunnels in Mexicali. They terrorized art museums and touched off worldwide fads.
Here are some of the best examples of participatory reporting published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, called “brilliant work” by the Los Angeles Times.Media by this author
Interview | September | 2024
Bill Wasick and Monica Murphy are life partners and co-authors whose book Our Kindred Creatures makes a case for seeing the fight against animal cruelty as a crucial thread in Americaʼs history. Readers are introduced to the activists, scientists, and moguls who helped create our modern views on animals, with our intense compassion for certain species and ignorant disregard for others. In Sentientist Conversations they discuss the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings."
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