Kim Barker

About

I'm a reporter on the investigative team at The New York Times, with occasional tangents into narrative writing. (Tips welcome!) My work on police traffic stops that turn deadly helped win a Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 2022. From 2010 to 2014, I was a campaign-finance and enterprise reporter at ProPublica, focusing on super PACs and dark money. From 2004 to 2009, I was the South Asia bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, covering the rise of the Taliban and other militants in both countries, the fall of President Pervez Musharraf and the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. I then did the press fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on Pakistan and Afghanistan. While there, I wrote a memoir on time in Pakistan and Afghanistan, "The Taliban Shuffle," published by Doubleday. The movie version, starring Tina Fey, came out in 2016 as "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot." (It's truthy, except for all the liberties that Hollywood takes. For instance, I did not save anyone from the Taliban.) Since 2018, I have been an adjunct professor at Columbia University, teaching master's students how to do what I do: Look up court records, do public-records requests, find people and get them to talk to me. I also frequently speak to journalism students in the U.S. and elsewhere.Specialties: Digging, diving, getting public records, interviewing, writing, mentoring, teaching, policing, housing, money in politics, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the "war on terror," Islamic movements.