Matthew Shaer is a journalist currently focused on exposing the criminalization of poverty in the United States.

Matthew Shaer is a journalist who has reported from Egypt, South America, Eastern Russia, the Syrian borderlands, and many other countries and regions of the world. His longform reporting has appeared in publications including The Atlantic and WIRED.

He is currently a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine.

As an Emerson Collective Fellow at New America, Matthew is working on a book about the criminalization of poverty in the United States. Tentatively titled, “The Worst Poverty: Debt and Profit in the Other America,” the book will examine the systems that keep the most impoverished Americans trapped in devastating cycles of debt.