Witt is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written for numerous publications including, The New York Times, Men's Journal, the New York Observer, n+1, the Oxford American, the London Review of Books, GQ, The Nation, and Miami New Times. Her writing has been described as a blend of "personal writing with social analysis." Her book Future Sex explores how women see the dating world in the 21st century; Publishers Weekly described her book as "an illuminating, hilarious account of sex and dating in the digital age, when hook-up culture and technology have vastly altered the romantic landscape." Witt is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Cambridge. She also graduated from Columbia's graduate school of investigative journalism. While in Mozambique on a Fulbright scholarship, she reported on Mozambican cinema for U.N. news agencies including IRIN and PlusNews. She wrote for numerous publications and moved to New York City. At age thirty, she found herself "single and heartbroken" and she resolved to explore why that was the case. Her focus shifted to dating and technology and sexuality; she traveled to San Francisco, dated often, and wrote about her encounters. She profiled the dating appTinder. Witt noted that many coming-of-age novels rarely addressed the issue of sexuality from a feminine perspective. In Slate magazine in 2013, she noted that, in many classic novels, the subject of female sexuality was missing or subdued, in addition to having female characters being defined simply in opposition to dynamic male characters; when she turned to books written by men, she was turned off.
Books
Essays and reporting
Book reviews
Emily Witt, "A Blizzard of Prescriptions", London Review of Books, vol. 41, no. 7, pp. 23–26. "OxyContin lamentable success was owed to a confluence of factors particular to the US. They include, but are not limited to: the country's dysfunctional privatised healthcare system, which makes it possible for addicts to accumulate doctors willing to prescribe painkillers in a way they can't in the UK; a corrupt regulatory agency beholden to the industry it was tasked with regulating; a punitive legal paradigm that criminalises drug users instead of helping them; an abstinence-only approach to treating drug addiction that impedes evidence-based medication-assisted treatment; corporate greed; a political class that takes marching orders from the lobbyists of said corporations; entrenched poverty, joblessness and hopelessness; and a general epistemological failure when it comes to ideas about what 'drugs' are, which psychoactive chemicals are safe and which are dangerous, and what a drug dealer is supposed to look like. prepared a consumer market for heroin. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, each one of them a world."
