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Mariah Blake

journalist

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 8, 2026
Entity authorityQ87192592 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mariah Blake is an American investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, CJR, and other publications.

In 2025, Blake published the book They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, a sweeping investigation of the American chemical industry and its decades-long cover-up of the dangers of PFAS, which are commonly known as "forever chemicals" because they don't break down in the environment. The book was a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize from Columbia University and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime from Mystery Writers of America. It was also named one of the best nonfiction books of 2025 by The Washington Post and Scientific American, which praise it as an "an epic of science writing."

Blake earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Barnard College and a Master of Science in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She was the 2016 Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Mariah Blake” as journalist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mariah, Blake and journalist.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2025, 2016—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Mariah, Blake and journalist providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Mariah Blake”, the useful work is to connect “journalist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q87192592. VIAF identifies the subject as 433174325283701412993. The Library of Congress control number is n2025010766. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2016.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

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  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Mariah Blake”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Mariah Blake primary sources, Mariah Blake archive and Mariah research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mariah Blake”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mariah Blake” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.