The New Republic, her essays and reportage have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Born in Virginia, she now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning is her debut.
At Lit Hub Fairbanks tagged ten favorite titles "about politics [that] dig deep into how people imagine politics—how we imagine what makes people happy and how much change we can tolerate to our self-image." One entry on the list:
Moises Naim, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to BeRead about the other titles on the list.
Paradoxically, imagining that maximally evil, conspiratorial, even psychopathic political villains—Soros, the Koch brothers—control our world can be a comfort, a purportedly dark worldview that belies a hidden optimism. If a small set of villains wield outsized power, it would be possible to right the world by ousting them. Naim has worked and traveled among favorite villains of the left and the right as head of Foreign Policy magazine and the World Bank’s executive director. And he does something virtually no other writer dares to do: really depict the world from the point of view of the Davos elites everybody likes to make out as evil geniuses. In Naim’s telling, they also feel impotent, even terrified—a persuasive argument that upends many myths of contemporary politics. I probably recommend this book to others more than any other work of contemporary political nonfiction.
--Marshal Zeringue