Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer is a leading journalist for The New Yorker known for her thorough investigations of topics relating to politics, ethics, and law.  Ms. Mayer attended Yale University and Oxford University before working as a correspondent and front-page editor for the Wall Street Journal.  As a part of her work she traveled to Germany, Russia, and Cairo to cover topics including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War.   She has written for The New Yorker for over a decade, devoting much of her recent time to articles on approaches to fighting terrorism under the Bush administration, and how those approaches challenge constitutional law and previous American foreign policy.  Her stories on the subject have provoked other editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as nominations for the National Magazine Award.  One story profiling a lawyer protesting American interrogation techniques resulted in his being honored with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.   She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a comprehensive book deriving from these articles, and delving further into the evolution of the interrogation policies the Bush administration adopted to combat terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11.

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday, 2008) was named one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2008.

Ms. Mayer is the author of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), a finalist for the National Book Award, and the best-selling book Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988 (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), with Jill Abramson.  She has also written articles for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.