Matt Taibbi

A vivid, brazen writer whose work tackles the most pressing contemporary issues with the urgency they deserve—be they political, financial, or societal—Matt Taibbi is just as riveting a speaker as his award-winning, wry journalism would suggest. He has both the professional chops and the hard-hitting style to piece together the problems behind a fractured America in ways other writers on the topic can’t, acting as both an accessible, entertaining public intellectual and academic for the everyman. What ties everything together for Taibbi, what much of his work, books, and talks are ultimately about, is unravelling that often intangible thread of inequality—which can be found in every aspect of American society today. In 2022 till 2023, Taibbi made headlines for breaking the news of The Twitter Files—a set of internal Twitter documents—in a riveting investigative series on the platform itself.

In The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap—a New York Times bestseller—Taibbi explores both sides of our new system of justice: the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. As he shares these incredible stories, he draws out their common source, and unveils what we need to do to stand up against the troubling trend of the Divide. Cory Doctorow wrote: “Taibbi’s spectacular financial reporting for Rolling Stone set him out as the best running commentator on the financial crisis and its crimes, and The Divide—beautifully illustrated by Molly Crabapple—shows that at full length, he’s even better.” It was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews.