MIKE McINTIRE
Mike is a journalist, author and editor whose work has been honored with three Pulitzer Prizes. As an investigative reporter at The New York Times, he looks for stories that reveal things people need to know about their health and safety, public institutions and elected leaders. Holding power to account through the disclosure of important information, often hidden or overlooked, is a guiding principle.
Mike shared Pulitzers in 2022 for reporting on the hidden financial incentives behind police traffic stops, and in 2017 for reporting on covert Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. During the 2020 presidential campaign, he was part of a team that obtained and published Donald Trump’s long-concealed tax returns. Earlier in his career, his investigations of corruption in college sports and medical malpractice were each finalists for Pulitzer Prizes. He teaches journalism at New York University and was a Ferris Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
The definitive story of the forces that shape gun culture and the American way of violence.
It wasn’t that long ago when you could still envision a future for America not marked by gun idolatry and empty offers of thoughts and prayers. Yet a witches’ brew of politics, money and ideology warped gun culture in the United States, hijacking the Second Amendment and opening the door to reckless marketing of powerful weapons driven by fear and insecurity. How did our country come to have more guns than people, and where just pulling into the wrong driveway can get you shot?
In Ricochet, Mike provides a bold new roadmap for understanding our fraught relationship with guns and violence. It is a gripping narrative of how the firearm became integral to the formation and ethos of the country, only to metastasize over time into a civilizational threat. The book features explosive new revelations about the NRA’s accumulation of power and turn to radicalism; Wall Street’s efforts to turbocharge the market for assault weapons and online gun sales; the gun lobby’s secretive campaign to change public attitudes by indoctrinating children; and how dark money, questionable scholarship and front groups are being used to knock down gun laws. It is, at once, a cautionary tale of unfettered liberty, swagger and free markets contributing to our violent undoing – and a prescription for how we might yet save ourselves.
A work of deep, revelatory investigative reporting, powerful storytelling and incisive analysis, Ricochet is in essence a story about America, an excavation of the cultural and political dynamics that are at the root of our contemporary crises.
A searing exposé of how the multibillion dollar college sports empire fails universities, students, and athletes.
With little public debate or introspection, our institutions of higher learning have become hostages to the rapacious, smash-mouth entertainment conglomerate known, quaintly, as intercollegiate athletics. In Champions Way, Mike chronicles the rise of this growing scandal through the experience of the Florida State Seminoles, one of the most successful teams in NCAA history
At the heart of Champions Way is the untold story of a whistle-blower, Christie Suggs, and her wrenching struggle to hold a corrupt system to account. Together with shocking new details about prominent sports figures, including NFL quarterback Jameis Winston and former FSU coach Bobby Bowden, Champions Way shines a light on the ethical, moral, and legal compromises inherent in the making of a championship sports program.
Beyond the story of Florida State, Mike takes readers on a journey through the history of college football, from its origins as a roughneck pastime coached by nineteenth-century professors to its current incarnation as a gold-plated behemoth that long ago outgrew its scholastic environs. Illuminated in rich and disturbing detail is the hidden financial ecosystem that nourishes hundred-million-dollar teams, from the hustlers who recruit players for schools and the athletic departments controlled by rich boosters to the universities whose academic mission and moral authority have been undermined. More than pointing out flaws, Mike examines their causes and offers hope to those who would reform college sports.