Tim Noah

“The Great Divergence” Slate.com

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate, where he writes "The Customer," a consumer column. Previously he covered health care reform and, for ten years, wrote Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Noah has also been an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, an editor of the Washington Monthly, and a staff writer at the New Republic. He is currently writing a book on income inequality.

Timothy Noah’s extraordinary ten-part series for Slate catalogued dozens of causes for the dramatic change in inequality in our republic, from the steep decline of the labor movement to the steady reduction of the effective tax rate on the rich and what he calls “the stinking rich”—the top .1% of the population who earn $1 million a year or more.

Noah also dramatizes the impact of the explosion of trade between the United States and less developed countries around the globe: “I typed this article on a laptop that was made in China. Everything I own was made in China. Everything you own was made in China, too. In 1979, when the Great Divergence began, you and I didn’t own anything made in China.”

This is the first time the Hillman Foundation has given the Magazine prize to an online publication. Noah’s series represents an extraordinary commitment to long-form journalism–the only kinds of stories that can be definitive about a subject as broad and important as this one.

Finalists for the 2011 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism:

• John Bowe, "Bound for America," The Nation Institute/Mother Jones
• Robert Steinback, "Under Attack," Intelligence Report/Southern Poverty Law Center
• David Evans, "Profiting from Fallen Soldiers," Bloomberg Markets