ISIS, she writes, “even ran its own D.M.V.” There are practical applications for such insights, the piece suggests. Through the lens of these records, Callimachi describes a regimented governing body focused on collecting taxes, issuing birth and marriage certificates, and meting out punishments. Callimachi and her team ultimately carted off more than 15,000 pages of documents. During five trips to Mosul spanning more than a year, she scoured abandoned buildings that had recently housed the workspaces, training grounds, courts, and living quarters of ISIS militants, stuffing tattered papers and folders the group had left behind into trash bags. The ISIS Files (Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times)Ĭallimachi is a reporter’s reporter she’s all about the documents. Just as lethal, Villarosa’s reporting demonstrates, is the frequency and callousness with which medical staff routinely - and disproportionately - dismiss the complaints of black pregnant women and ignore warning signs.
Why? The piece lays out evidence for a theory that black women bear the trauma of systemic racism in their very physiology - that years of exposure to the stress of discrimination wreaks havoc on a body, and might contribute to pregnancy complications.
We lose black newborns and black mothers at astonishing rates in the U.S., black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants, Villarosa writes, and black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts. Villarosa’s unflinching examination of giving birth while black in America has stayed with me. Senior Researcher for investigative journalist Ronan Farrow Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis (Linda Villarosa, The New York Times) Here is the best in investigative reporting.
We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories.