On October 26, 2025, the New Yorker workers writers Larissa MacFarquhar, Rebecca Mead, Ian Parker, Kelefa Sanneh, and Michael Schulman joined the manager editor Daniel Zalewski onstage on the twenty sixth annual New Yorker Competition, a weekend of conversations, screenings, performances, and extra. The Competition, which is the journal’s signature occasion, was held in New York Metropolis and introduced collectively main voices in literature, movie, comedy, tv, politics, and drugs.
Larissa MacFarquhar has been a workers author at The New Yorker since 1998. She has written about child-protective providers, the battered-women’s motion, dementia, and hospice care, and her profile topics have included Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, and Hilary Mantel, amongst many others. She is the writer of “Strangers Drowning: Unimaginable Idealism, Drastic Selections, and the Urge to Assist.” Earlier than becoming a member of the journal, she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Evaluation. She has acquired two Entrance Web page Awards from the Newswomen’s Membership of New York and the Johnson & Johnson Excellence in Media Award. Her writing has appeared in “The Finest American Political Writing” and “The Finest American Meals Writing.”
Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a workers author in 1997. She has profiled many topics, amongst them Lin-Manuel Miranda, Margaret Atwood, Jesse Armstrong, and Mary Beard. She is the writer of a number of books, together with “My Life in Middlemarch,” a New York Instances best-seller, and “House/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return.” She has served as a McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton College and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 2020. She lives in London, and has written about cold-water swimming within the U.Okay., scandals on the British Museum, and the Cerne Abbas Big.
Ian Parker contributed his first piece to The New Yorker in 1992, and have become a workers author for the journal in 2000. He has profiled a spread of cultural figures, together with the Apple design chief Jonathan Ive, the filmmaker Ken Burns, the poet James Fenton, the photographer Sebastião Salgado, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, the singer Elton John, the historian Yuval Noah Harari, the novelist Daniel Mallory, the architect Norman Foster, and the New York mayor Eric Adams. His article “The Present,” in 2004, acquired the Nationwide Journal Award for Profile Writing. Beforehand, he was a tv critic for the London Observer, a author and an editor for the Impartial, and a contributing author for Discuss. He lives in New York.
Kelefa Sanneh has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2001, and has been a workers author since 2008. He’s the writer of “Main Labels: A Historical past of Widespread Music in Seven Genres,” and is a contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning.” Beforehand, he labored because the pop-music critic on the New York Instances and because the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and tradition. His writing has appeared in a number of magazines and books, together with “Shake It Up: Nice American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z” and a number of volumes of “Da Capo Finest Music Writing.” He lives in New York Metropolis together with his household.
Michael Schulman, a workers author, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2006, writing primarily about arts and tradition. His profile topics have included the comic Bowen Yang, the director Ridley Scott, the talk-show host Wendy Williams, and the actors Patti LuPone, Adam Driver, Elisabeth Moss, and Jeremy Sturdy. He has written greater than 100 Discuss of the City items and contributed long-form interviews with such topics as Linda Ronstadt, Robert De Niro, Fran Lebowitz, Maya Rudolph, and Mel Brooks. He’s the writer of the best-selling biography “Her Once more: Changing into Meryl Streep” and “Oscar Wars: A Historical past of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears,” a New York Instances Notable E-book of 2023.
Daniel Zalewski is an government editor at The New Yorker. He edits the work of lots of the journal’s workers writers, together with Jane Mayer, Patrick Radden Keefe, David Grann, Rebecca Mead, Luke Mogelson, and Lawrence Wright. Beforehand, he was an editor on the Instances Journal and Lingua Franca. For The New Yorker, he has contributed profiles of such figures as Ian McEwan, Guillermo del Toro, and Werner Herzog, and has additionally written about topics starting from amnesia to artwork restoration.
