Emma Goldberg is a writer at the New York Times. She covers the culture of work, and also writes on a variety of other topics. She has reported on all sorts of people — including an atheist chaplain, doctors on the frontlines of Covid, Zoomers in the office and exclamation point enthusiasts. She has written essays about rethinking time, reporting on grief, and why crises create new vocabulary. She has also created a workplace personality quiz so you can figure out: Are you a cubicle cat or couch koala? Her book, Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, was published by HarperCollins in June 2021. The Washington Post called it “essential reading.” She is the winner of the New York Press Club’s Nellie Bly Award, the Newswomen’s Club of New York Best New Journalist Award and the Sidney Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award. She received her BA at Yale and MPhil at Cambridge University.
Follow her on Twitter and reach her at emma.goldberg@nytimes.com.
Recent Selected Work
Full list of clips available here
Essays and Features
An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours The New York Times, January 21, 2024
Off the Clock The New York Times, June 14, 2023
What Shiva Taught Me About Covering Tragedy The New York Times, September 16, 2022
The New Words for Our New Misery The New York Times, December 4, 2020
Sampling of Workplace Features
All of Those Quitters? They’re at Work The New York Times, May 13, 2022
‘Training My Replacement’: Inside a Call Center Worker’s Battle With A.I. The New York Times, July 19, 2023
The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them The New York Times, October 28, 2021
Burned Out on Your Personal Brand The New York Times, October 20, 2022
Investigations
She Didn’t Want a Pelvic Exam. She Received One Anyway. The New York Times, February 17, 2020
When Poor People Are Beaten for Seeking Help The New York Times, October 26, 2019
Language
She’s Building a Little Jewish Magazine on Big Ideas The New York Times, December 30, 2022
Where Do We Stand on the Exclamation Point? The New York Times, September 27, 2019
Hating Comic Sans is Not a Personality The New York Times, October 9, 2019
Don’t Call Toni Morrison a Poet The New York Times, August 6, 2019
The Sharpness of Robert Frank’s American Experience The New York Times, September 10, 2019
HAHAHA Astra Mag, July 27, 2022
More Workplace Features
Chatfished: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With A.I. The New York Times, May 7, 2023
The R.T.O. Whisperers Have a Plan The New York Times, April 11, 2023
Have the Anti-Capitalists Reached Harvard Business School? The New York Times, November 28, 2022
What Comes Next for the Most Empty Downtown in America? The New York Times, December 17, 2022
The Magic of Your First Work Friends The New York Times, July 14, 2022
When Working for Racial Justice Means Taking Black History Month Off The New York Times, February 12, 2022
When Your Boss is Crying, But You’re the One Being Laid Off The New York Times, August 24, 2022
A Full Return to the Office? Does ‘Never’ Work For You? The New York Times, June 9, 2022
What Would It Take to Turn More Offices Into Housing? The New York Times, December 27, 2022
You’re Still on Mute The New York Times, June 19, 2022
What Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ Has Meant to Women The New York Times, June 2, 2022
How Roe Shaped the World of Work for Women The New York Times, May 7, 2022
When Where You Work Determines if You Can Get an Abortion The New York Times, July 2, 2022
Are You Happy? Your Boss Is Asking The New York Times, May 16, 2022
A Two-Year, 50 Million-Person Experiment in Changing How We Work The New York Times, March 10, 2022
Working 9 to 2, and Again After Dinner The New York Times, April 29, 2022
Everyone is Not OK, but Back at Work Anyway The New York Times, March 30, 2022
Some Care Workers Are Seeing a Bump in Pay. They’re Working to Make It Last. The New York Times, April 16, 2022
Why Some Workers Are Getting All the Covid Tests They Need The New York Times, January 12, 2022
No More Working for Jerks! The New York Times, January 8, 2022
The End of a Return to Office Date The New York Times, December 11, 2021
Public Displays of Resignation: Saying ‘I Quit’ Loud and Proud The New York Times, December 4, 2021
The Worst of Both Worlds: Zooming from the Office The New York Times, November 16, 2021
Social Issues and Human Interest
The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist. The New York Times, August 26, 2021
Is This the End of Tipping? The New York Times, February 21, 2021
‘Relapsing Left and Right’: Trying to Overcome Addiction in a Pandemic The New York Times, January 4, 2021
Teens in Covid Isolation: ‘I Felt Like I Was Suffocating’ The New York Times, November 12, 2020
What ‘The Babylon Bee’ Thinks Is So Funny About Liberals The New York Times, October 11, 2020
Put Down Your No. 2 Pencils. But Not Your Face Mask. The New York Times, September 27, 2020
Bar and Medical Exam Delays Keep Graduates in Limbo The New York Times, September 4, 2020
‘I Can’t Focus on Abortion Access if My People Are Dying’ The New York Times, June 30, 2020
How Reparations For Slavery Became a 2020 Campaign Issue The New York Times, June 18, 2020
A Scholar of Democracy Gets a 2020 Lab for His Ideas The New York Times, February 15, 2020
Would a 37-Year-Old Woman Be Where Pete Buttigieg Is? The New York Times, January 18, 2020
‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses The New York Times, January 11, 2020
A Farewell to Feministing and the Heyday of Feminist Blogging The New York Times, December 8, 2019
Hong Kong Protests Spread to U.S. Colleges, and a Rift Grows The New York Times, October 26, 2019
Do Works by Men Implicated by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom? The New York Times, October 7, 2019
What Was Lost in ‘the Last Good War’ The New York Times, December 15, 2019
Health and Medicine
‘I Have a Ph.D in Not Having Money’ The New York Times, November 25, 2019
Hospital Chaplains Try to Keep the Faith During the Coronavirus Pandemic The New York Times, April 11, 2020
‘I Am Worth It’: Why Thousands of Doctors in America Can’t Get a Job The New York Times, February 19, 2021
They Told Her Women Couldn’t Join the Ambulance Corps. So She Started Her Own. The New York Times, April 19, 2021
Pediatrics Group Offers ‘Long Overdue’ Apology for Racist Past The New York Times, August 20, 2020
For Doctors of Color, Microaggressions Are All Too Familiar The New York Times, August 11, 2020
What the Covid Rookies Saw The New York Times, June 4, 2021
Vaccine Memories of Another Time and Place The New York Times, December 25, 2020
For Long-Haulers, Covid-19 Takes a Toll on Mind as Well as Body The New York Times, September 7, 2020
When Coronavirus Care Gets Lost in Translation The New York Times, April 17, 2020
A Medical Class ‘Minted by the Pandemic’ The New York Times, March 24, 2020
When the Surgeon is a Mom The New York Times, December 20, 2019