Vauhini Vara began her writing career as The Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook beat reporter, in the 2000s, and has since become a recognized voice — in nonfiction and fiction — on the subject of how technology is changing what it means to be human.
Vara has spoken regularly about AI, technology, and human communication and selfhood, including at universities such as Stanford, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Texas, and Ohio State University, as well as for organizations such as the Chautauqua Institution, the New York State Writers Institute, and the American Library Association. She has been profiled in numerous publications, including the New York Times, and has frequently appeared on national radio and TV programs such as All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Marketplace, This American Life, Amanpour and Company, and CNBC's Power Lunch.
Her latest book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025), is a work of journalism and memoir about how big technology companies exploit human communication and how we’re complicit in this. (The book includes a dialogue she had with ChatGPT, which you can learn more about in this Guardian piece she wrote about it and this interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.) The New York Times and others named it one of their most anticipated books, Publishers Weekly named it one of their 10 Best Books of the Year, and Esquire named it one of the best books of the year. It was also awarded the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Award in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category.
Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao (Norton, 2022), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and won the Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize and the Colorado Book Award. Her story collection, This is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and won the Kalinga Literary Festival Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. For her body of work, she has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award.
After beginning her career as a technology reporter at the Wall Street Journal, she later launched, edited and wrote for the business section of the New Yorker’s website. Since then, she has also both written and edited for the New York Times Magazine and the Atlantic. She writes for other publications as well, including Businessweek, where she is a contributing writer; her most recent article, published in September 2025, investigates how tech companies and school districts are pushing AI into classrooms despite inconclusive research into how it works and whether it helps or harms learning. She is also a 2025 Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence. Her journalism has been honored by the Asian American Journalists Association, the International Center for Journalists, the McGraw Center for Business Journalism, and others.
Vara is also the author of a play, Ghost Variations — a stage adaptation of her viral essay “Ghosts” — which was selected to be performed as part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’s 2024 Colorado New Play Summit. And she is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project.
Vara was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, to Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in suburbs of Oklahoma City and Seattle. She later lived in New York and San Francisco and now resides in Colorado with her husband, the writer Andrew Altschul, and their son.
Vauhini Vara's website
