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Mike Mariani

Mike is a writer and journalist based in the DC area, and the author of What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us, published in August 2022 by Penguin Random House. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times T Magazine, The Guardian, Slate, and many other publications. 

What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us

Mike's first book, What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us, is a work of narrative nonfiction focused on six people whose lives were capsized by trauma and tragedy. From devastating car accidents to long-term incarceration to traumatic brain injuries, these individuals endured some of the most harrowing experiences a person can face. His book seeks to examine and explain how they changed in the years and decades following these before-and-after events. 

 Order here

Featured Articles

The New York Times •

Opinion | The Democratic Party’s Masculinity Crisis

For some time now, the Democratic Party has been desperately searching for its own version of masculinity — one that can meet our highly contentious social and political moment without breaking from the party’s cherished progressive principles.

Earlier this campaign season, this casting about led to Graham Platner. The Maine Senate candidate’s oyster cages and kettlebells seemed to offer a forceful rebuke to the internet right’s efforts to emasculate Democrats as “soy boys” and “snowflakes.” But the implosion of Mr. Platner’s campaign showed the danger of grasping for masculine credentials while overlooking the specific history and character of the man.
NOEMA •

Your Perception Of Time Is, In Fact, Warped | NOEMA

We keep marveling at how fast the years go by. The deeper problem is that we’re forgetting them — and losing the quiet, boring moments where memory forms.We’ve long been ensorcelled by the passage of time. Puckered leaves fluttering from the spidery arms of barren trees. Grains of sand tumbling through the delicate neck of an hourglass. A curved cornice perched over a snow-covered mountain, awaiting an avalanche to bring it down. These evocative emblems of seasons, hours, and the vicissitudes th...
Smithsonian Magazine •

For Many Americans, Covid Is Still a Chronic, Disabling Disease. These Scientists Are Working Tirelessly to Bring Them Relief

Julia Moore Vogel was living with her husband, Bobby, and their 2-year-old daughter in the sun-drenched suburbs of San Diego when the Covid-19 pandemic swept into the United States on commercial airplanes and cruise ships. Vogel, who has both a PhD in computational biology and medicine and an MBA from Cornell University, worked for Scripps Research at its facilities in La Jolla. She cherished her job managing a part of an ambitious study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) known as...
New Scientist •

Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal | New Scientist

As an overworked medical school student, Mark Horowitz started taking an antidepressant 20 years ago to lessen his gnawing anxiety about his future. The pill, escitalopram, helped, and he didn’t give it much thought as he took the medication every day for the next 10 years. He decided to stop after reading an article suggesting antidepressants’ effects tend to wear off over time, and tapered his dose carefully over several months. Even so, he says, his life “exploded”.


He started having panic...
Aeon •

The Catholic Church can be a force for environmental change | Aeon Essays

In the United States and elsewhere, it’s often taken for granted that the Catholic Church is a conservative institution with little engagement in the fate of the natural world. And for ample reason. Consider the biblical verse that’s slithered into modernity like a false prophet, Genesis 1:28. Here, God tells Adam and Eve: ‘Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.’ This...
The New York Times •

‘To Catch a Predator’ Ended Almost 20 Years Ago. Its Grim Legacy Lives on.

It begins with a jumble of fragments, all deceptively benign: the warbling of birds, a well-dressed man pacing through the frame, a dial tone. Then we’re dropped into a phone call between a man and what sounds like a young girl. “So, you know we gotta be, like, really careful about doing this,” he says. It has taken exactly 70 seconds for us to intuit that the call we’re hearing centers on a planned sexual encounter.This is the opening of the newly released documentary “Predators,” a look at one...
The New York Times •

Wholesome, Noble Superheroes Are Back. (A Wholesome, Noble World Is Not.)

Around the time Joaquin Phoenix dabbed red, white and blue clown makeup over his face in the movie “Joker” — the film’s attempt, perhaps, to say something bleakly profound about America’s brokenness — we reached the peak of a metamorphosis that superhero movies had been undergoing for a while. They had luxuriated in moral ambiguity. They had, like the comics they drew from, reimagined iconic characters as battered, disillusioned misanthropes. Zack Snyder was given three films to explore his brui...
NOEMA •

How We Became Captives Of Social Media | NOEMA

In his famous Socratic dialogue, “The Republic,” the Greek philosopher Plato introduced what would come to be known as the allegory of the cave. In his scenario, a portion of the human population is confined to a cave, where they’re chained by their legs and necks and forced to stare solely at a cave wall upon which shadows of objects from the outside world are projected.Having been imprisoned inside the cave for as long as they can remember, the prisoners come to regard the shadows flickering a...
BostonGlobe.com •

The mistake Democrats keep making about character - The Boston Globe

Senator Tim Kaine’s line of questioning in the hearing focused almost exclusively on Hegseth’s infidelities, which have been extensively documented. Kaine neatly encapsulated the nominee’s chronic unfaithfulness by referencing an episode in which Hegseth had sex with a woman he’d met at a GOP conference in Monterey, Calif. — a woman who filed a sexual assault complaint shortly thereafter — just two months after Hegseth fathered a child by another woman with whom he’d been in an extramarital affa...
WIRED •

The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor

Sophie Papp and her family had a ritual for the recently departed. Whenever a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all squeeze into a car and drive to Koksilah River, an hour north of their homes in Victoria, British Columbia. There, they would spend the day swimming in the glassy jade water, letting the current drag them along the squishy riverbed and gazing at the native arbutus trees, whose red bark peeled like crinkly snakeskin. After her grandmother passed away, Sophie—a swe
Mother Jones •

How income inequality is messing with kids' brains

With its bright colors, anthropomorphic animal motif, and nautical-themed puzzle play mat, Dr. Kimberly Noble’s laboratory at Columbia University looks like your typical day care center—save for the team of cognitive neuroscientists observing kids from behind a large two-way mirror. The Neurocognition, Early Experience, and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definitively prove t
the Guardian •

The great gaslighting: how Covid longhaulers are still fighting for recognition

Before the coronavirus pandemic swept through New York City like a foaming white storm surge in the spring of 2020 and irrevocably displaced the trajectory of her life, Hannah Davis was an expert in artificial intelligence and machine learning. She gave talks on her projects, which included working with a computer program that generated music from literature, at Ted conferences, technology expos, even the Library of Congress.

Toward the end of March 2020, as the first wave was gathering speed a

The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias (Published 2020)

East Wind is what its 72 residents call an intentional community, a modern descendant of the utopian colonies and communes of centuries past where individuals share everything from meals, chores and living space to work, income, domestic responsibilities and the burden of self-governance. The term intentional community dates to the late 1940s, when the Inter-Community Exchange — an organization formed in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the wake of World War II to help promote peaceful, cooperative livi
The New Yorker •

A Town for People with Chronic-Fatigue Syndrome

In December of 2012, I came down with what at first looked like a bad case of mononucleosis. I felt tired and had a sore throat, a cough, and a slight fever. At the time, I was twenty-six and working as an adjunct English professor at a small college in Westchester, New York. It was Christmas break, so I thought that I would sleep it off and feel better by the New Year. But over the next few months my symptoms grew to include muscle pain, migraines, and occasional vertigo. The cough went away bu
GQ •

The Would-Be Terrorist vs. the FBI

It was December 2010, and 26-year-old Matthew Llaneza felt like the walls were closing in on him. He'd been discharged from the Marines after a month, for chronic asthma, and he was living with his grandparents in a one-floor stucco house in Mesa, Arizona. The city of just under a half million people sits 20 miles east of Phoenix and is surrounded by the Sonoran Desert, a vast swath of dry, rugged terrain whose towering cacti and craggy, sun-bleached rock formations stretch deep into Mexico. Alt
theatlantic •

American Exorcism

Priests are fielding more requests than ever for help with demonic possession, and a centuries-old practice is finding new footing in the modern world.

Louisa Muskovits appeared to be having a panic attack. It was March of 2016, and Louisa, a 33-year-old with a history of alcohol abuse, was having a regular weekly session with her chemical-dependency counselor in Tacoma, Washington.

Louisa had recently separated from her husband, Steven. When the counselor asked about her marriage, she said sh
The Atavist Magazine •

Promethea Unbound

For Georgia Smith, home was a beat-up red Plymouth Voyager minivan with a bad engine block. A Greek immigrant in her early forties, she had been evicted from her San Francisco apartment in the fall of 1996. Georgia didn’t want anyone to alert social services that she and her daughter Jasmine were destitute, so for several months they’d been living as nomads. She shuttled the five-year-old around the city by day before finding a parking lot where they could spend the night. They never stayed in o
the Guardian •

The neuroscience of inequality: does poverty show up in children's brains?

With its bright colours, anthropomorphic animal motif and nautical-themed puzzle play mat, Dr Kimberly Noble’s laboratory at Columbia University in New York looks like your typical day-care centre – save for the team of cognitive neuroscientists observing kids from behind a large two-way mirror.

The Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definit
Mother Jones •

How income inequality is messing with kids' brains

With its bright colors, anthropomorphic animal motif, and nautical-themed puzzle play mat, Dr. Kimberly Noble’s laboratory at Columbia University looks like your typical day care center—save for the team of cognitive neuroscientists observing kids from behind a large two-way mirror. The Neurocognition, Early Experience, and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definitively prove t
Nautilus | Science Connected •

How Nostalgia Made America Great Again

ake America great again. Clearly the message resonated. In 2016, prior to the presidential election, the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group, published its annual American Values Survey. It revealed 51 percent of the population felt the American way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s. Further, 7 in 10 likely Donald Trump voters said American society has gotten worse since that romanticized decade.

Of course America today has its problems, but many indices of s
Vanity Fair •

Is Trump’s Chaos Tornado a Move From the Kremlin’s Playbook?

On March 12, 2014, the Russian author Natan Dubovitsky published a short story titled “Without Sky” in the literary journal Russian Pioneer. In the story, which takes place in a dystopian future, a man recalls the events of the fifth World War, decades earlier. He describes these events as the first “non-linear war.” Instead of fighting in a traditional sense, as a battle between two sides, World War V was a more byzantine conflict. Multiple nations all fought one another at once and could switc
Hazlitt •

Meticulous Gloom

Charles Dickens used to spend Sunday afternoons at the Paris morgue, staring at dead bodies. In The Uncommercial Traveler, he describes the “invisible force” that “drags” him to the morgue whenever he passes through the city. In his diaries he recounts visiting on Christmas and New Year’s Day, studying newly arrived corpses as water dripped from the ceiling onto their bloated visages, delaying decomposition. On one visit, he observes custodians bringing in a newly arrived corpse, surrounded by a
Psychology Today •

How Did Two All-Americans Fall In With ISIS?

On a 90-degree day in August 2015, two FBI agents arrived at the house of Oda and Lisa Dakhlalla in Starkville, Mississippi. Oda, originally from the West Bank, was active at the mosque just across the street from their home. He also tutored Mississippi State students in calculus and trigonometry, earning him the nickname Yoda. For years the couple ran the family's restaurant, Scheherazade's, named after the ingenious storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights. Lisa, a Muslim convert who grew up
Hazlitt •

Alone in the Jungle

About halfway through Disney’s remake of its own 1967 adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Kaa, the enormous rock python voiced with seductive sibilance by Scarlett Johansson, lulls our hero, Mowgli, into a kind of punch-drunk hypnosis in which he sees how he came to be the lone man-cub in the jungle. His father is mauled to death by the imperious tiger, Shere Khan, thus sending Mowgli spiraling into orphanhood, which simultaneously leaves him both impossibly vulnerable and utterly a
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Contact Me

Please feel free to contact me at mikeseanmariani@gmail.com. My inbox is always open.