Taylor Lorenz

As the role of a technology reporter has evolved into a more sociological profession, the Times’s Lorenz has cemented herself as a peerless authority. During her stints at the Daily Beast and The Atlantic, her name became synonymous with youth culture online. But this characterization amounts to a reductive view of her coverage of the ways in which people of all ages use Internet platforms today. Sometimes the phenomena she highlights are zany or creative, such as high school students using Google Docs for group chats. Just as often, her reporting calls out abuses by influencers or elected officials spreading hateful messages. She herself has experienced harassment firsthand in the process of investigating new online communities. Also this year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she’s published various theses about our common (virtual) lived experience. Readers scratch their heads in disbelief as Lorenz manages to unearth trend after trend that, despite seemingly infinite scrolling, millennials even 10 years her junior never stumble across. As she told her employer in a Q&A profile last year, her method involves multiple social media accounts per app, spending an hour on TikTok every night before bed, and, most of all, asking “why,” rather than merely “what?”