Elizabeth Bruenig

About

My name is Liz Bruenig, and I’m a writer from Arlington, Texas. I met my husband, Matt, on our high school debate team; his website is here, and if you’re more into numbers and quantities than letters and qualities, you should check it out. Or even if not.

Before either of us had websites to hock, we were high school and then college students putting in hours at the library (thrilling.) I graduated from Brandeis University in 2013, and attended Cambridge University on a Marshall Scholarship, where I earned my MPhil in Christian Theology with a focus on Christian ethics in 2014. I returned to a doctoral program at Brown University in religion and philosophy, but I dropped out and became a magazine writer after a semester. There’s a whole story there, but the point is that’s how I got into the biz.

I started writing at the ten-thousandth iteration of The New Republic in the winter of 2015. By then, my longtime boyfriend (still Matt) was my husband, and in fall of that year, we found out I was pregnant with our first baby. Then we found out The New Republic was being put up for sale. There’s a whole story there, too, but the point is that’s how I really got familiar with the biz.

I took a job as an assistant editor in The Washington Post’s Outlook/­Post­Everything section — a fun, interesting little nook inside the Post’s venerable newsroom set aside for well-argued essays and personal reflections. I had nearly no writing experience and absolutely no editing experience, so over the next few years — including the run-up to the 2016 election and its aftermath — I learned on the job. I had a blast, and a baby.

By 2018, I was writing in the Post’s Opinion section. That fall, a couple of special things happened: I published What Do We Owe Her Now?, an investigation of an unprosecuted gang rape that took place in my hometown in 2006, and we found out I was pregnant (again; different baby). In 2019, another pair of special things: I was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for my story, and I had my second baby. I also taught a course at Georgetown University entitled Telling the Truth, about why that task isn’t as morally simple as it seems in journalism.

In 2020, I took a job as an opinion writer with The New York Times. At the Times, I developed what I now consider the mainstay of my craft: reported opinion essays, which combine what I love about reporting (fresh, investigative, vital, surprising information), opinion (I appreciate the opportunity to be upfront and transparent with my readers about what I think), and essays (gorgeous writing, or as close as I can get to it). After covering a rollercoaster election year, a pandemic, and a last-minute federal execution spree, I accepted a job with The Atlantic in 2021.

Here at The Atlantic, I’ve had fun covering dangerous liaisons at Yale Law School, the trouble with ‘innocentric’ death penalty activism, and the mystery illness that felled mid-Atlantic songbirds just as COVID-19 looked as though it might relent. I have other irons in the fire, two kids to lasso, and a podcast with my husband (still Matt), too.

We take it easy around here. I like to bake (and decorate) cakes, cookies, macarons (the fussy little round cookies, not the coconutty lumpy ones, or the president of France), and bread. One kiddo is into soccer, swimming, and caves; the other one is into sea creatures. Both are perfect in every way. Matt’s got some kind of project going on in the garage and tearing out the drywall is involved. And I’m still writing.