Farhad Manjoo


Farhad Manjoo is an American journalist. Manjoo was a staff writer for Slate magazine from 2008 to 2013 and left Slate in September 2013 to join The Wall Street Journal as a technology columnist. Manjoo replaced columnist David Pogue at The New York Times in January 2014 and has been a contributor to National Public Radio since 2009.

Early life and education

Manjoo was born in South Africa in 1978 to a family with ancestral roots in India. A cisgender man, Manjoo has stated a preference for singular they pronouns, but Manjoo's Twitter also lists "he/him". The family left South Africa when Manjoo was eight years old, and moved to Southern California. Manjoo graduated from Cornell University in 2000. As an undergraduate, Manjoo served as writer and editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun student newspaper.

Career

Manjoo wrote for Wired News before taking a staff position at Salon.com. In July 2008, they accepted a job at Slate magazine writing a twice-weekly technology column. In September 2013, they joined The Wall Street Journal as a technology columnist; their final column for Slate, urging men to wear makeup, was published on September 20. They later moved to The New York Times.
Manjoo has written about technology, new media, politics, and controversies in journalism.
They are the author of the book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.
They shared the 2018 Gerald Loeb Award for Breaking News for the story "Ouster at Uber."
In March 2018, they published a column in the Times about a personal experiment in getting most of their news from print sources for two months. The piece drew criticism from the Columbia Journalism Review and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism for the article's assertion Manjoo had "unplugged from Twitter" for this period when in fact they continued to use the social media service daily. Manjoo felt the piece was sufficiently clear that they made exceptions to their "unplugged" policy, and The New York Times stood by the piece. WNYC's On the Media removed a segment with Manjoo discussing the experiment.