Announcement from Executive Features Editor Ben Williams, Deputy Features Editors Hank Stuever and Amanda Finnegan:
We are excited to announce that Dan Zak will officially become a Style assignment editor on Nov. 1.
Dan has been editing on a temporary basis since July 2023, and it’s become clear that what makes him a brilliant reporter and writer also makes him a sharp, thoughtful editor. A sampling so far includes his editing on stories about the rat-catching terriers of Washington; RFK Jr. and the faint remains of Camelot; actor Tom Selleck; New York’s most sought-after butt doctor; and a controversial Foggy Bottom cat named Kitty Snows.
Originally from Buffalo, Dan first came to The Washington Post from American University in 2005 as a Style summer intern, impressing editors and landing a reporting job in the Southern Maryland bureau. Dan next spent a couple of years in the Sunday Source, the paper’s late, great lifestyle/service section, where, among other things, he was one of the “Three Wise Guys” (with Joe Heim and Justin Rude) who co-wrote a popular and funny advice column.
After the Sunday Source shut down, Dan returned to Style in January 2009 as a features writer, where for 15-plus years he has done it all, from politics to human interest to arts – and exquisitely so: profiles (Anthony Fauci, Robert Gates, Parker Posey, Lorne Michaels), scene stories, clever takes and well-observed Washington vibes and meaningful moments.
He has co-written the annual in/out List, covered Oscars nights and the afterparties in Hollywood, and filed compelling dispatches from the BP oil spill; the East Palestine train derailment; the West, Tex., fertilizer plant explosion, California wildfires, climate change, American political unrest and more. He contributed to National’s coverage of Hurricane Sandy, the Trayvon Martin murder and the Sandy Hook mass shooting and served a reporting rotation in Iraq in 2011. In peak form, his 2013 feature about how a group of protestors broke into the Oak Ridge, Tenn., nuclear laboratory became a book, “Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age” (2016, Blue Rider/Penguin).
In March 2024, we published one of Dan’s finest – “The Hero,” a remarkable narrative about a combat veteran who intervened in a mass shooting in a Colorado bar and received great acclaim, while coping with the realization that terror can find you anywhere. Dan was also Style’s reporter at the Paris Olympics this summer. Going forward, we hope he’ll take opportunities to occasionally write.
Please join us in congratulating Dan on his new role – and don’t hesitate to send him story ideas.
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