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Rebecca Mead

The New Yorker

#9 in Social Issues

Description: Rebecca Mead is a staff writer at the New Yorker.

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2 Reviews for Rebecca Mead

By OliviaDylan

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Rebecca Mead - One perfect

October 04, 2009

Rebecca Mead is wonderful. She has written plenty of
good articles for the New Yorker. Rebecca has been
writing for 'The New Yorker' since 1997. She has become
quite distinguished through her articles on legal
prostitution, trade on human eggs etc. With penetrating
and fluid language she delivers her social criticism to
create awareness among the general public. The articles
become interesting and unforgettable through her
exceptional literary ability.

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By bhwalker

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Polished vignettes of New York eccentricity

May 15, 2009

When it comes to the English language, Rebecca Mead is
a rare talent, a skilled artisan who produces expertly
polished sentences with every word meticulously placed
for best effect. Her features, profiles, and Talk of
the Town pieces are the product of a disciplined and
orderly mind that nonetheless exhibits a creative
spark. Mead has been with the New Yorker for more than
a decade, and, in that time, she has shown a writerly
versatility and a diversity of interests. Some of her
early features, which are well worth digging up from
the New Yorker's online archives were, at least
tangentially, concerned with women's issues, such as
her much-discussed article about the market in human
eggs. This article is indicative of what has been a
recurring concern in Mead's writing--the
commercialization and commodification of that which is
most personal, private, intimate, and unique about
human experience. In addition to writing about egg
donors, Mead has also addressed legal prostitution in
Nevada. More recently, in a somewhat controversial and
trenchant piece of social criticism, Mead exposed and
catalogued, to the chagrin of bridezillas everywhere,
the tawdry excesses of the wedding industry. This
latter feature became the basis of Mead's first book.
More recently, Mead seems to have lost some of her
critical edge. She has been slowly but surely drifting
away from social issues towards profiles, generally
somewhat cloistered treatments of figures in the world
of highbrow arts. A recent profile of opera singer
Natalie Dessay. But you'll find most of Mead's writing
nowadays in the Talk of the Town section, for which she
pens short anecdotal slices of life and witty
portrayals of New York eccentricity.