Nellie Bowles

Nellie Bowles is an American journalist. She is noted for covering the technology world of Silicon Valley. She has written for the English-language Argentine daily the Buenos Aires Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, The California Sunday Magazine, the technology journalism website Recode, the British daily The Guardian beginning in 2016, then for Vice News,  The New York Times and most recently The Free Press.

Career
From 2017 to 2021, Bowles covered technology for The New York Times in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Gerald Loeb Award for investigative reporting along with two colleagues for her investigation into online child abuse; according to editor Dean Murphy, their "deep, persistent and compassionate reporting" served to "hold both government and big tech accountable, and tell the stories of untold children who have endured this abuse in silence." She covers the technology and business world of hi-tech startups and venture capital, and she has written about personalities such as Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman. She covered the exclusive conference of technology CEOs called Further Future, and has written about subjects such as doxxing and cryptocurrencies. She appeared twice on the Charlie Rose nationally broadcast television interview show.

Bowles's reporting is often controversial; for example, her account of her interview with Jordan Peterson attracted much attention. She has moderated televised discussions on the subject of free speech in the digital age, and she has written about gender equality in the tech world. Her reports regarding the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have sometimes generated additional controversy. She and The New York Times were sued for defamation by Harvard professor and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig over her reporting of Lessig's writings about Jeffrey Epstein's donations to the MIT Media Lab in The New York Times. Lessig subsequently dropped the lawsuit after the headline and lede were changed to better represent his views.

In 2021, Bowles along with Bari Weiss launched Common Sense on Substack. The publication changed names to The Free Press in 2022. The Free Press is now the top earning Substack with more than 630,000 total subscribers. Bowles is the company's head of strategy and writes a weekly column called TGIF.

Her story “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand” was turned into a feature-length documentary, produced by The New York Times and FX and came out in March 2024.

Her first book, titled Morning After the Revolution, was released in May 2024 by Thesis, a new imprint of Penguin Random House. The book laments what Bowles describes as a far-left/radical progressive takeover of institutions in the US, including the governments of many major cities and media outlets, such as San Francisco and The New York Times. She found "the left can be somewhat goofy." and "The book’s ambient contempt for progressives is legible; its actual thesis much less so."

Personal life
Bowles is a descendant of Henry Miller, who was dubbed the "Cattle King of California" and was at one point one of the largest landowners in the United States, and a descendant of Thomas Crowley, who founded the transportation and logistics company Crowley Maritime.

Bowles graduated from Columbia University in 2010.

Bowles is married to political commentator Bari Weiss, a relationship she says led her to convert to Judaism. She also says the conversion was part of a personal drive to be more empathy-driven in her reporting. They have a daughter, born in 2022.