“Like my father, I used to believe that hard work and mastery of a standardized exam was the fairest way for students like me to compete with those who had far more resources.”

American cultural critic and writer

Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American cultural critic and writer. He is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White, published in 2019, and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His work also includes writing for The New York Times Magazine and serving as an Easy Chair columnist for Harper's Magazine. He is a visiting professor of the humanities and a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022.