Mallory Simon is a writer for the Daily Skimm, theSkimm's flagship daily newsletter, and Well Played, theSkimm's sports newsletter. For the Daily Skimm, she covers breaking news, public health, politics, internet culture, and the stories shaping the national conversation. For Well Played, she writes about women's sports, the business of sports, internet culture, and the stories people can't stop texting each other about.

Before joining theSkimm, Mallory spent more than 15 years at CNN, where she helped launch and write CNN's first award-winning breaking news blog (before live blogs were a thing). That turned into working alongside correspondents in the field, helping shape digital reporting and social coverage long before it became standard. Which meant breaking news had a way of sending her just about anywhere across the country as she covered everything from natural disasters and elections to race in America, with a beat specializing in extremism, white nationalism, and misinformation. Ask her about the weirdest — and best — small towns she's ever reported from.

Then the world shut down.

As the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped daily life, Mallory was tapped to work alongside CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, interviewing leading epidemiologists, physicians, scientists, and public health experts. Like most Americans, she didn't know much about infectious diseases when COVID hit — and that's exactly who she was reporting for. Her job wasn't to be the expert. It was to ask the questions everyone else was asking, translate rapidly changing science, and explain why it mattered.

That work evolved into CNN's Reopening Project, where Mallory worked closely with epidemiologists, physicians, and public health experts as schools, restaurants, workplaces, and communities reopened. Rather than offering one-size-fits-all answers, the reporting explored how experts weighed the latest evidence and made decisions about everything from sending kids back to school to eating indoors, returning to the office, and traveling again. Along the way, she also picked up one unexpected skill: pronouncing far more prescription drug names than anyone who didn't go to medical school probably should.

Today, she helps theSkimm's readers make sense of breaking and major news in the Daily Skimm and everything happening in women's sports (and, okay, the men's too) in Well Played.

When she's not writing about them, she's probably shouting at the TV during a New York Liberty game, finding any excuse to watch the USWNT, wondering why she's still an Islanders fan, or convincing herself this is finally the year for one of New York's teams. You'll probably still find her somewhere shouting, "Knicks in five." She's also a proud Hoosier alumni, graduating from Indiana University with a degree in journalism and a minor in criminal justice — and she's still in shock that her basketball school somehow won a national championship.