David Samuels (born 1967) is an American non-fiction and fiction writer. He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. He was a longtime contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, and a contributor to The Atlantic, N+1, and The New Yorker, as well as the literary editor of Tablet. Background and education Samuels grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1989, he graduated with a BA in history from Harvard College, where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Samuels became a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he received a master's degree in history in 1993. Career Early years Samuels' first article to receive much public attention was a controversial 1991 cover story on rap music in The New Republic; the piece—which contended that the primary hip-hop audience consisted of white suburban teens—has been widely anthologized. A later article he wrote on rap music for The New Yorker was reprinted in the Best Music Writing of 2000 collection, edited by Peter Guralnick. His work has also been anthologized in Best American Political Writing of 2004, Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2006, and other collections., as well as the French nonfiction quarterly Feuilleton. Magazines Samuels was a Contributing Editor at Harper's Magazine from 1996 to 2018, and has written over a dozen long features for The New Yorker. His stories have also been featured on the covers of The Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine. His work hearkens back to the New Journalism of the 1960s—a blend of first-person observation, detailed reporting, and a careful attention to language. Samuels' pieces for Harper's are often panoramic takes on a single event, including the demolition of the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the riot at Woodstock 1999, a Donald Rumsfeld press conference at the Pentagon, and Super Bowl XL in Detroit. His features for The New Yorker and The Atlantic often focus on extreme subcultures and individuals with double identities. His long profile of Yasir Arafat for The Atlantic in September 2005 was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting, and was named one of the three most important articles of the year by the columnist David Brooks in The New York Times. After publishing a controversial cover story in The Atlantics April 2008 issue about the paparazzi who trail Britney Spears, Samuels appeared on NPR's On the Media, and