Overview
- Chalabi published Ten Lives in 2026 and is promoting the book in recent profiles that highlight its six-year reporting process and a newly recorded audiobook.
- The book organizes interviews with anonymous people across income levels into ten composite characters that combine narrative detail with Chalabi’s signature hand-drawn data visuals.
- Chalabi is unusually candid about her motives and finances in the book, including a frank line about being paid to write it and personal reflections on her early career and her mother’s illness.
- She is a Pulitzer-winning Iraqi-British data journalist known for visualizing wealth gaps and humanitarian harms, and she donated her $15,000 Pulitzer award to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate as part of longstanding advocacy.
- Chalabi aims to shift public and journalistic conversation about class by showing fine-grained economic differences, which could lead to more precise reporting and public discussion of how class shapes daily life.