Start Here: What Chills Is and Why It Matters
A few years ago, I got fired from The New York Times for expressing emotion publicly.
As Joe Biden’s plane landed on the tarmac ahead of his inauguration, I tweeted that I had “chills.”
That tweet — that single expression of relief after four years of chaos — became a Category 5 shitstorm. Right-wing outlets went ballistic. My name was in headlines everywhere. And the Times decided they couldn’t have that.
So they fired me.
Not long after, a man called from an unknown number and purred into the phone: “How are your chills?”
That became the name of this newsletter.
Turns out getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it led me here.
I’m Lauren Wolfe. I’ve spent two decades reporting on some of the hardest stories in journalism — rape as a weapon of war in Syria and Congo, stolen children in Ukraine, corruption that destroys lives. I’ve chased monsters across continents and spent years pulling back the curtain on crimes powerful people hoped would stay hidden.
The controversy over my firing sparked a national debate about journalistic objectivity, cancel culture and whether journalists should be robots. Wesley Lowery from “60 Minutes” said we should be judged by the fairness of our work, not random tweets. Alyssa Milano told her 3.7 million followers to demand I be rehired.
Here’s the thing: I spent my whole career holding it together while reporting on babies being gang-raped in Congo, on women in Syria, on atrocities most people will never have to think about. But I was supposed to not have feelings about our own democracy hanging by a thread?
Screw that.
What You Get Here
Chills is where I tell stories that make your heart hurt and hopefully make you think. Stories about women, trauma, war zones and places most journalists don’t bother to cover. Stories about how this administration is hurting people around the world and what’s happening to our democracy at home.
But this isn’t just another outrage newsletter. I’m not here to perform grief or manufacture anger. I’m here to do the work — real reporting, real analysis and the kind of behind-the-scenes transparency about how difficult journalism gets made that you won’t find anywhere else.
In 2022, Substack nominated my work here for a Pulitzer.
Some Posts to Get You Started
Is it cold in here? — How I got here and why this place exists
How a journalist chases a monster, Part 1 — Seven years reporting on child rape in Congo: the logistics, the ethics, the cost
I am Jewish. I say that because I’m scared. — On being an “other” in America right now
What happened at CBS is dangerous— An insider’s view on at censorship at “60 Minutes”
What Paid Subscribers Get
Free subscribers get access to some posts and can email me questions anytime. But if you want the full experience:
Paid subscribers ($6/month or $60/year) get:
All posts, including my heaviest reporting and analysis
Moderated Q&As with guest journalists
Monthly office hours where you can ask me anything
Community access and paid-only comment threads
Founding members ($200/year) get everything above, plus:
Direct Q&As with the people I interview
1:1 conversations with me about your own journalism or the stories you want to see covered
Why This Work Matters
Journalism as we’ve known it is dying. Newsrooms are gutted. Important stories go untold because no one wants to fund the expensive, difficult work of actually reporting them.
I spent thousands of dollars of my own money to report this Kavumu story. I got arrested. I thought I’d gotten a source killed. I’ve received death threats.
I keep doing it anyway, because these stories need to be told. But I can’t do this work without you.
I’m not objective. I’m not a robot. I write about what pisses me off and breaks my heart, and I do it with the rigor of 25 years in this business.
If you want journalism that feels something, you’re in the right place.
Welcome to Chills.
—Lauren
About Lauren
Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist and photographer who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The Guardian. She is a contributing writer for Washington Monthly, and an adjunct professor at NYU’s graduate school of journalism.
She is a former columnist at Foreign Policy magazine, and director and creator of WMC WomenUnderSiegeProject.org, a journalism initiative on sexualized violence in conflict originated by Gloria Steinem at the Women’s Media Center in New York. The project included a live, crowd-sourced map of sexualized violence in Syria. She is also the creator and editor of WMC Climate, which positions the people climate change affects the most — women and people of color — front and center.
Wolfe was an editor and reporter for the live New York Times coverage of both the coronavirus and the presidential election in 2020.
From the BBC to CNN, she has spoken about her work on TV and radio internationally. In 2015, she testified before the UK House of Lords, and in 2012, she both testified at the United Nations on her team’s findings on rape in Syria and presented them to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She has conducted field reporting from the Middle East to Central Africa to Central America, interviewing hundreds of women and men suffering from the fallout of war. Wolfe also served on the advisory committee of the Nobel Women’s Initiative’s International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict.
Previously, Wolfe was the senior editor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she focused on journalists and sexualized violence. Her CPJ report “The Silencing Crime” — for which she spoke to dozens of journalists around the world — broke ground in documenting the issue.
Wolfe spent three years at The New York Times reporting on September 11th for Times’ books 102 Minutes: The Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers—a 2005 National Book Award finalist—by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn and City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, by James Glanz and Eric Lipton.
In 2017, after a series of articles and photos in The Guardian and Foreign Policy magazine directly led to the arrest and conviction of a politician and members of his militia—they had been raping toddlers in eastern Congo for three years—she was named a finalist for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, the Kurt Schork Memorial Award, and the One World Media Awards, and was called one of five journalists “making a big difference in the world” by Bono’s One.org. She is an inductee of the Ochberg Society for journalists who cover violence, has taught as an adjunct in Columbia’s Strategic Communications masters’ program, and been a fellow at the Blue Mountain Center.
She studied at Wesleyan University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is the recipient of four awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, two from the Fair Media Council, and of the 2012 Frank Ochberg Award for Media and Trauma Study. In 2014, she was given a “What Better Looks Like” Award for making a “compassionate and innovative contribution” to improving the world, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation named her a finalist for the Trust Women Journalist Award.
In 2013, Foreign Policy magazine named Wolfe one of its “FP Twitterati 100,” calling her an “authority on gender and conflict”; Action on Armed Violence included her in their list “Top 100: The Most Influential Journalists Covering Armed Violence”; and the UK’s Daily Telegraph named her “an awesome woman you need in your life on Twitter.”
