Ariel Levy, the longtime New Yorker writer and National Magazine Award winner, is joining “60 Minutes” as a contributor for the CBS newsmagazine’s upcoming 59th season.
“Ariel is an astonishingly original writer and reporter, fearlessly going to far-flung places and exploring sensitive topics that have driven consequential debates,” “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Nick Bilton wrote in a Monday memo to staff obtained by TheWrap.
Levy has spent nearly three decades reporting and writing for New York magazine and The New Yorker, covering culture, gender, sexuality, health and other topics. She joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008 after spending 12 years at New York magazine.
Her 2013 New Yorker essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which chronicled the loss of her pregnancy while on assignment, won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism in 2014. Levy later explored grief and other experiences from her life in her 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply.”
She is also the author of the 2005 book “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” and hosted the podcast “The Just Enough Family,” about the rise and fall of the family behind what Bilton described as “one of the most successful family businesses in America.”
Bilton said Levy has demonstrated “an ability to get people to talk, to find the unexpected story and to tell it with depth and humanity.”
“I’m beyond excited to see what she does at 60 Minutes,” he added.
Levy joins the long-running CBS newsmagazine as it prepares for Season 59 under Bilton, who took over the program earlier this year. In his note to staff, the executive producer said the show’s correspondents and contributors bring different journalism backgrounds and storytelling approaches but share the qualities central to “60 Minutes.”
Those include “curiosity, independence, incredible reporting, a willingness to hold power to account, and an instinct for the kind of stories people can’t stop watching,” Bilton wrote.
