Galaxy Brain Charlie Warzel

Who am I?

Previously, I was a writer at large for the New York Times Opinion page. At the Times I was the lead writer of the paper’s Privacy Project and a co-author of “One Nation Tracked,” a seven-part investigative series, for which I was named a finalist for the 2020 Livingston Award for National Reporting. Before the Times, I was a senior technology writer at BuzzFeed News, covering technology’s biggest platforms.

What do I write about?

For the past 11 years I’ve dedicated my journalism to telling the story of how technology changes everything it touches. I care deeply how these forces shape and distort our culture and our politics, and how they reimagine our economies.

I love to report. It’s led me to extensively document the first decade of Twitter’s failure to tackle its harassment problem. I charted the upside-down world of the pro-Trump media and one of its most dangerous personalities (Alex Jones). Sometimes my stories are absurd (the great poop-emoji feud of 2017). Sometimes the work is investigative (revealing a massive smartphone-location data set).

Many of the stories I’m proudest of moved outside the realm of technology. I’ve written about my own struggles with the pandemic, the wildfires in the West, and my ability to eat an alarming quantity of cheap sandwiches. In 2016 I flew to Sweden on a ticket purchased with Bitcoin and got an RFID microchip implanted in my hand for a story about the future of money. I once let Facebook’s algorithms tell me what to do for a month and ended up friending a few hundred people and throwing a birthday party for a guy I’d met only twice. What I’m trying to say is that this newsletter will get weird and personal.