New York Times international editor Phil Pan sent out the following on Monday:
Investigative reporting is core to the mission of The Times and to our expanding journalistic efforts around the world. Earlier this year, we established our first overseas investigative reporting team, and today we are thrilled to announce another investment in this priority area: Mara Hvistendahl is joining The Times as a new investigative correspondent focused on Asia.
Mara comes to us from The Intercept, where she has been an investigative reporter for the past three years, writing revealing stories on subjects such as how Oracle marketed its software to the Chinese police for surveillance and how big box stores are connected to Uyghur forced labor.
Mara was based in China for eight years, first as a correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education and later as the bureau chief for Science. Since then, the country has been a focus of her freelance work, as she wrote for Wired about a Chinese A.I. giant giving state surveillance an edge and for MIT Technology Review about the coming challenges for Chinese technology giants.
Her book, “Unnatural Selection,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction, explored the gender imbalance in Asia and what it means for the world. In 2020, she published “The Scientist and the Spy,” about an industrial espionage case involving a Beijing company.
“Mara is a relentless digger, the kind of reporter who turns every page and reads every word. She also brings a knowledge of China’s history and culture to all her reporting, especially on the Chinese surveillance state. Plus, she gets the occasional poem into a story,” said Vera Titunik of Headway, who edited Mara’s freelance work at Wired.
Mara, who speaks Mandarin, Spanish and Dutch, is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where she minored in Chinese, and has a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.
Mara will work closely with our China team as we continue to explore a multidisciplinary approach to coverage, as well as with our new, dedicated international investigations team.
