Goldberg departs NY Times biz desk for styles section

Stella Bugbee, the editor of the New York Times styles section, sent out the following on Wednesday:

After a dominant run in Business covering shifting workplace culture and crafting narrative features about cultural and societal change, Emma Goldberg is headed to Styles.

Emma, who expertly and inventively covered the future of work, will bring her eye to stories that capture the zeitgeist broadly, illuminating how people live, work, consume and create culture, and feel about the world around them.

At the start of her three and a half years on the Business desk, Emma took on the future of work beat while that future was very much up in the air. Her reporting on hybrid work, return-to-office mandates, how bosses were behaving (sometimes badly) and how workers were navigating it all found a wide audience and helped define the conversation about post-pandemic work and workplace culture.

In an expanded features role on Business in recent months, she chronicled this inflection point for corporate D.E.I. efforts, the faith of the tech elite and C.E.O.s on psychedelics  (maybe behaving badly).

“Whether she is writing about call center workers doing battle with A.I. or confused corporations parsing out the meaning of illegal D.E.I. or egg freezing, Emma’s stories reveal what society is collectively thinking with cogent analysis and delicious detail,” said Ellen Pollock, Business editor. “We will miss her in Biz but can’t wait to see what she does in Styles.”

“Emma is a phenomenon. She can do it all,” said Vera Titunik, Emma’s editor on Business. “She read the entire Malcolm Gladwell opus in a weekend to prepare for a sharp and revealing interview. She listened patiently and empathetically to people in a Louisville homeless encampment. She hopped on the news of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.’s killing and brought new insight. She writes so beautifully and with such frequency and breathtaking speed that I suspected some kind of Hermione Granger-like magic was at play and would frequently be left blubbering, ‘How did you do that?’”

Emma’s interests range widely, and her byline does as well; for the Magazine, she reported on the life, death and legacy of the peace activist Vivian Silver, who was killed in the Oct. 7 attack. For National, she spent time with an atheist chaplain.

And Emma is no stranger to the Styles pages already; she has chronicled everything from cowboys to Jewish Currents to Curtis Sittenfeld.

Emma, who joined The Times in 2019 as an assistant for the editorial board, is the author of the 2021 book “Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic.”