Aymann Ismail has a gift for excavating human stories from beneath the surface of national news coverage. At Slate, where he’s a senior staff writer, he doesn’t shy away from tough subjects—religion, politics, drug addiction, guns, war—and approaches a story with curiosity, patience, and empathy. For his National Magazine Award-nominated piece, “The Store That Called the Cops on George Floyd,” he did exactly that, spending time with the owners of CUP Foods, Minneapolis community members, and the store employee whose 911 call sparked a chain of events that the entire world watched.
Ismail brings that same care to other stories, like “The Woman on the Line,” a Longreads Top 5 pick about a safe-use hotline operator in Georgia who takes calls from people who don’t want to use drugs alone; and “Fear and Hope in Springfield, Ohio,” another Longreads favorite in which he reported from a town thrust into the spotlight after Trump claimed during a 2024 debate that its immigrant community was eating pets.
This curiosity and insightful reporting define Ismail’s work. “I’m genuinely curious, and people can usually tell,” he writes. “I like staying in a conversation past the point where most people would politely move on, asking one more question, then another, until the strange detail hiding underneath the first answer finally comes out.” It’s a trait that has served him well in journalism (and perhaps less well at dinner parties, his response implies).
