Sofi Thanhauser

Biography

Sofi Thanhauser’s work has been featured in MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, and Vox. She is a recipient of a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Calderwood Journalism Fellowship, and has held fellowships and residencies from Fulbright, ClimateWorks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, and Jentel. She is the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (Pantheon, 2022).

Sofi Thanhauser headshot.

See Work

ESSAYS / Summer 2025

Profits and False Promises

By Sofi Thanhauser ,  Illustration by Max-O-Matic

In the eerie, quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s 2021, halfway through a Fulbright to Hungary, I went to a medical clinic in Budapest to have a lump in my breast examined. I wasn’t too worried. I was young, it was probably a cyst...

Collage of US government documents related to the war on cancer; the center of the collage is ripped open to reveal a poster beneath reading, "Conquer Cancer." Image by Max-O-Matic.