Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg, born in 1974, was raised in New Mexico as one of 10 siblings. He attended a magnet high school in Albuquerque and majored in history at Yale University. In 2001, a few years after graduating from Yale, he matriculated at Harvard Business School. He interned for a private-equity firm during business school but decided to pursue a journalism career after becoming fascinated by the public radio show This American Life. After earning his MBA, he interned at the Washington Post and then, in 2003, obtained a job at the Los Angeles Times. At the Los Angeles Times, he worked as a war reporter based in Baghdad, covering the Iraq War, and as a U.S.-based music journalist. Several years later, he took a job at the New York Times, where he was part of the journalistic team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for their work on Apple’s impact on global business. While at the New York Times, he also published his first two books, nonfiction bestsellers The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012) and Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business (2016). After quitting the New York Times in 2017 to focus on longer-form journalism, Charles Duhigg became a reporter for the magazine The New Yorker. In 2024, he published his third book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Communication. He currently lives in California with his wife, research scientist and marine biology professor Elizabeth Alter.