Ross Barkan

Ross Elliot Barkan (born October 22, 1989) is an American journalist, novelist, and essayist.

Barkan grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He attended Stony Brook University and earned a master's degree from New York University.

Barkan was a staff reporter at the Queens Tribune. He covered New York City and national politics for the New York Observer from 2013 to 2016. In April 2016, he rose to prominence after resigning from the Observer over the newspaper's close relationship with Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate. The Observer's executive editor, Ken Kurson, said in an interview that he had advised Trump on a speech Trump gave before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Barkan resigned the day after the Observer endorsed Trump in the New York Republican primary, He later told CNN, "a line had been crossed and I thought it was time for myself to depart."

As a columnist and freelance reporter, Barkan has contributed to the Village Voice, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Reuters, Esquire, GQ, New York Daily News, Daily Beast, The Baffler, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Columbia Journalism Review. He covered the 2013 New York City mayoral race, including Anthony Weiner's campaign, and the 2016 presidential race. He has taught journalism and media studies at NYU and St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn. He was a staff reporter at New York Magazine and remains a columnist there.

Barkan was a columnist for The Guardian and a columnist for Jacobin magazine. He is a contributor to The Nation.

In 2023, he was named a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

Barkan has published fiction in Post Road, Boston College's literary magazine, and literary criticism in the Iowa Review, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, and The Brooklyn Rail.

His debut novel, Demolition Night, was published in 2018.

His second book, The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York, was published in 2021. It was well-reviewed, with The Nation calling it a "swift and devastating read".

In 2022, Barkan's second novel, The Night Burns Bright, was published.

Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid called Barkan "consistently one of the most interesting and original essayists of his generation". His third novel, Glass Century, was published in May 2025 to critical acclaim. The Wall Street Journal called it "absorbing" and "charged with heart-in-throat suspense" and George Monaghan in The New Statesman deemed it "unflaggingly bright". The Jewish Book Council reviewed the novel favorably, arguing it "earns its place in the canon of the New York City novel, along with Don Delillo’s Underworld, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and many others."

In October 2017, Barkan announced he was running in a September 2018 Democratic Party State Senate primary in New York City, planning if nominated to challenge incumbent Marty Golden. His campaign was managed by future New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and endorsed by the New York Daily News and local politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but he lost the primary to Andrew Gounardes by 15 percentage points.

In Barkan's 2018 candidate profile page on the New York City Campaign Finance Board website, he described himself as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Barkan received the New York Press Club's award for distinguished newspaper commentary in 2017 and in 2019.

• Demolition Night (Tough Poets Press, 2018)

• The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York (OR Books, 2021)

• The Night Burns Bright (Lake Union Publishing, 2022)

• Glass Century (Tough Poets Press, 2025)

• Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics (Verso Books, 2025)

• New Yorkers in journalism