NY Times hires Miller as domestic correspondent

Lori Leibovich, the editor of Well at The New York Times, sent out the following on Thursday:

A family decides to put their 13-year-old daughter on a new weight loss drug.

The parents at a progressive private school form the front line in vaccine denial.

A woman on the brink of menopause becomes psychotic.

A 30-year-old man who struggles with mental illness and homelessness is killed on the subway by a fellow rider.

In her 12 years as a feature writer at New York magazine, Lisa Miller has explored these health topics and more through intimate and deeply reported narratives about the complexities of being human. I am thrilled to announce that Lisa will now be joining Well as a domestic correspondent.

In a stressful and confusing world, attaining good health is a constant preoccupation, yet its optimal version seems always out of reach. This is Lisa’s sweet spot. At the heart of each of her stories is the human struggle to find balance amid uncertainty, and she delicately excavates the tensions between an individual’s desire for a better, more satisfying life and the countervailing forces of environment, biology, experience and culture.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Lisa to The Times,” said Sam Sifton, assistant managing editor for culture and lifestyle coverage. “Her eye for detail, wellspring of empathy and beautiful prose are matched only by her keen reportorial instincts. Working with Lori, she’ll thrive on Well’s stage.”

While at New York, Lisa covered ambition, teenagers, aging, medicine and science. She has written about the health outcomes of inequality and bias in medicine. “Orders of Grief,” her story about Sandy Hook one year after the mass shooting, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2014 and included in Best American Magazine Writing that year. In 2017, Lisa was on the team that won the National Magazine Award for “Guns and Empathy,” a video documentary short. She has won the New York Newswomen’s Club Award for Feature Writing multiple times.

Prior to New York, Lisa was a senior editor at Newsweek, first running coverage of health, medicine, education, religion, parenting and relationships, and then writing about religion both in a weekly column and in feature stories and profiles, including a spiritual biography of Barack Obama published the month before the 2008 Democratic convention. Before that, she worked at The Wall Street Journal, where she was an editor on the Marketplace page, then a reporter on the Weekend section, and ultimately developed the religion beat. She was also a religion columnist for The Washington Post and is the author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife,” which was published by HarperCollins in 2011.

At Well, Lisa will continue to write her signature, enterprising feature stories and profiles about all aspects of mental and physical health.

A graduate of Oberlin College, Lisa starts on Feb. 12. Please join me in congratulating her and welcoming her to The Times.

— Lori