Kathryn Schulz has spent much of her writing life investigating a comic human predicament: certainty is easiest to enjoy precisely when it is least deserved. Before a mistake is exposed, it does not arrive wearing a dunce cap. It feels ordinary. It feels settled. As she put it in a talk that has traveled far beyond the conference hall, being wrong feels like being right. Then the floor shifts.
That floor is sometimes metaphorical and sometimes the Cascadia subduction zone. Schulz moves comfortably between the two. She can begin with an error, a lost key, a spider, a nineteenth-century poem, or a piece of coastal geology and keep turning it until the subject discloses its history, its science, its private ache, and usually its joke. Her beat at The New Yorker is described as books, science, and culture. The more exact description may be the hidden bigness of familiar things.
An education in not knowing
Schulz grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family deeply interested in ideas. Her mother taught. Her father, Isaac, was a lawyer, an energetic talker, a polyglot, and a hungry reader. His recently finished books accumulated upstairs, close enough to consult and safely distant from the beautifully organized downstairs shelves. Returning one, Schulz later joked, might require a card catalogue and a crowbar. It is a small family scene, affectionate and exact. It also contains the future writer: order downstairs, curiosity upstairs, and language alert to the absurdity between them.
At Brown University she studied history, not journalism. She did not work at the student paper. What she took from college was more useful than a premature professional identity: permission to enter a subject as a beginner. She learned, she has said, that it was fine to be ignorant, to walk into an unfamiliar field, ask questions, and persuade other people to share what they knew.
“It is a laboratory for error.”Kathryn Schulz on education
After graduating in 1996, she went to Portland, Oregon. A year away before an imagined doctorate stretched into another kind of education. She moved to Latin America, used her Spanish, and became a reporter and editor at The Santiago Times in Chile, covering environmental, labor, and human-rights issues. Journalism offered a discovery: her appetite for ideas did not require a return to the academy. It could be put on a plane, handed a notebook, and sent outside.
She returned to the United States in 2001 and worked for Grist, eventually editing the environmental publication. A Pew Fellowship in International Journalism followed in 2004, along with reporting across Central and South America, Japan, and the Middle East. She later became the book critic for New York magazine. The itinerary looks broad because the curiosity was broad. Environment, politics, literature, science: none was a private province. Each was a place where a patient outsider could learn the local language.
The Schulz turn
The wrongologist gets a title
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error appeared in 2010. Its governing subject was not the embarrassment after a mistake, but the mental country before the border crossing, when the mistaken person remains serenely convinced. Schulz gave herself a lightly ridiculous specialty, “wrongology,” then pursued it across psychology, philosophy, politics, and ordinary quarrels. The joke worked because the inquiry was serious. Error is not an exotic malfunction. It is one of the ways the mind encounters the world.
Her 2011 TED talk, On Being Wrong, compressed that argument into seventeen minutes and a memorable image. The sensation of error, while it is happening, is usually invisible to us. We discover it only later, when evidence intrudes. More than five million plays on TED’s own site suggest that a large audience recognized the condition, perhaps in other people first.
Schulz’s advice to students carries the same generous skepticism. Forgive yourself. Take risks. Try what you are not good at. Mistakes can be richer than correct answers because they expose the shape of a mind in motion. This is not permission to be careless. Her other piece of writing advice is fiercely exacting: love the world, and love words enough to stay awake at three in the morning fixing one that bothers you. Curiosity opens the door. Revision checks the hinges.
A fault line enters public life
Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. That July, the magazine published “The Really Big One,” her account of the Cascadia subduction zone and the earthquake and tsunami risk facing the Pacific Northwest. The subject joined two private fascinations. She loved geology, and she had lived in Portland, with people she cared about still in the region.
The piece works by correcting scale. Human lives are brief; tectonic intervals are not. A quiet coastline can therefore look like proof of safety when it is merely a short sample. Schulz led readers through buried evidence, Japanese records, ghost forests, and the accumulating scientific case for a rupture. Technical knowledge became narrative knowledge. Readers did not merely receive a risk figure. They learned why the ground had been misunderstood.
The article won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award. Its civic effect mattered to Schulz. Readers bought emergency kits and asked what preparation meant. She followed with practical guidance. Her counsel was local and unspectacular: understand the buildings where you spend time, know evacuation routes, and decide how a family will reunite. Fear can command attention. Information must tell that attention where to go.
History leaves the classroom
Brown graduation leads west, then south, toward reporting in Latin America.
Error becomes an adventure
Being Wrong appears, followed by a TED talk that carries wrongology worldwide.
Cascadia comes into view
“The Really Big One” brings seismic risk to a wide public and wins the Pulitzer.
Lost, found, and honored
Lost & Found is published and later receives a Lambda Literary Award.
The word in the middle
Soon after Schulz fell in love with the writer Casey Cep, her father died. She wrote a 2017 magazine essay that was both an elegy for him and an investigation of loss, that peculiar category roomy enough for a person, a wallet, a war, and a sock. Suggestions that the essay might become a book did not immediately persuade her. There was more to say about mourning, certainly. She simply did not want to spend years saying only that.
The book found its form on a late-night drive through Alabama. Cep was researching the work that became Furious Hours. The two discussed the unfinished idea, and Cep used the unremarkable phrase “lost and found.” Schulz heard its smallest component echo through the car: and. Loss had a mirror image in discovery. Her father’s death and her love for Cep had arrived close together. Neither experience erased the other. The conjunction allowed them to occupy the same life.
“Every love story is a chronicle of finding.”Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found
Published in 2022, Lost & Found became a memoir in three parts: “Lost,” “Found,” and “And.” Its materials range from private memory to meteorites, missing objects, and poems. Schulz has called it a covert poetry anthology. That description catches her method again. A category begins as something ordinary, almost too familiar to examine. Then etymology, cosmology, literature, and lived experience gather around it until the plain word becomes crowded with worlds.
The book received the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography. By then Schulz and Cep were living with their family on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where the geography supplied more than scenery. The region carries histories of slavery, escape, agriculture, water, and contested American memory. Schulz, raised in the North, has spoken about how knowing Cep and the Shore complicated inherited stories of regional innocence. Finding another person can also mean finding the limits of one’s map.
Range is a method
Her recent magazine work continues to roam: solar storms, Norman Maclean, suspense, stones, spiders, Jewish migration through Galveston, Thomas Pynchon, Tennyson, Dolly Parton. A list like that can make range sound like restlessness. On the page, the continuity is plain. Schulz is drawn to systems that exceed casual sight and to words worn smooth by use. She wants to know what a thing is made of, how we came to misunderstand it, and what changes after we look again.
The work is learned without being chilly and personal without turning the world into a mirror. Humor performs an ethical service. It leaves room for the reader to be wrong without being humiliated, which is often the only room in which a mind will change. Wonder does the rest. A fault line becomes legible. A mistake becomes humane. A conjunction becomes architecture.
Schulz once said that the writer needs to love the world and love words. Her career reads like a long experiment in keeping those devotions balanced. Love only the world and the sentence may sag under all it wishes to contain. Love only words and nothing beyond the page gets a fair hearing. The trick is to look outward, revise inward, and remain awake to the possibility that the obvious story is merely the first draft.