Louisa Thomas ’04 is at her best in transit. Her finest work develops not when she sits down to write, but on her run directly before. That’s when she plots a story in her head, teasing out disparate threads and weaving them into a cohesive narrative. “Sometimes it will seem a little bit insane,” she admits. “Even if I have a tight turnaround deadline, I’ll go run for 10 minutes or go for a walk—just to get going.” When she sits down to write, it’s pretty obvious to her whether she’s hitting the vein or trying to force it. And now, working on an article about baseball’s pandemic start under a pressing deadline, she’s trying to force it.
A staff writer for The New Yorker who covers sports, Thomas had originally planned to write about the novel experience of watching baseball with no fans: the eerie cardboard-cutout filled stands, the synthetic noise emanating from its TV broadcasts. But as sportswriters during the pandemic have come to expect, the situation…
