Amanda Ripley is a New York Times bestselling author, a Washington Post contributing columnist, and the co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict. She has written three award-winning, nonfiction books about three very different subjects: High Conflict, The Smartest Kids in the World, and The Unthinkable.
About Amanda
Mission
To help cultivate the kind of storytelling many of us need but cannot find in traditional journalism.
Bio
Amanda follows people who have been through a transformation to find out what the rest of us can learn. Her most recent book is High Conflict, which chronicles how people get trapped by conflicts of all kinds—and how they get out. Her previous books include The Unthinkable, which was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary, and The Smartest Kids in the World, a New York Times bestseller (which also inspired a documentary film).
For the Washington Post, POLITICO Magazine and other outlets, she has written feature stories on what Congress could learn from a former gang leader, the three ingredients missing from the news, and the untold story of the Afghan women who hunted the Taliban.
Amanda started her journalism career covering courts and crime for Washington City Paper, where she had the great fortune to work for the late David Carr, who pushed reporters to listen to people who were different from themselves. She then spent 10 years working for Time Magazine in New York, Washington and Paris, helping Time win two National Magazine Awards.
Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Harvard Business Review and the Times of London. Previously, she served as an Emerson Collective Senior Fellow and the host of the Slate podcast How To!
To discuss her writing, Amanda has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX News and NPR. She’s spoken at the Pentagon, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Currently, Amanda lives in Washington, D.C., with her family. She is a trained conflict mediator and a less well-trained youth soccer coach.