Joseph Nocera

Former senior editor Joe Nocera was born in Rhode Island and wrote and edited at Texas Monthly between 1982 and 1986. His October 1982 feature, “It’s Time to Make a Deal,” about T. Boone Pickens’s first big takeover attempt, was the story that launched his career as a business journalist. Nocera has written for Washington Monthly; Esquire; GQ; Fortune, where he was the editorial director; and the New York Times, where he spent time as a business columnist and an opinion columnist.

Nocera has won multiple business-writing awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the commentary category in 2007. His 1994 book, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class, won the Helen Bernstein Book Award as the best nonfiction book of 1995. Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, which he cowrote, won the 2017 PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing. He also wrote and narrated the podcast The Shrink Next Door, which won a Webby Award in 2020 and was adapted into an Apple TV+ miniseries in 2021. During Nocera’s time in Texas, sources who discovered where he was born inevitably said, “Son, we’ve got ranches bigger than Rhode Island.”