Reporting through the decades.

Wave one: 1980–1981

The accidental reunion of Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman generated immediate local press coverage in upstate New York and metropolitan New York. The earliest stories were published as human-interest reunion features rather than as investigations of the study; the language of “identical strangers” and “long-lost triplets” that would attach itself to subsequent coverage originated in this period. The pieces are valuable today as documents of how the story was first told to the public — as wonder, not as scandal — and as the print record of contemporaneous interviews with the brothers, their adoptive parents, and the friends and college staff who watched the reunion unfold.

This archive is gradually compiling a chronological reading of these pieces from the public record. The most useful single contemporary source for newcomers is the local paper that ran the original photograph; specific citations will be added to this page as the index grows.

Wave two: 1995–2007

The second wave is sparser and more substantive. Lawrence Wright wrote a long New Yorker piece on twin research in 1995 that included sustained discussion of the Neubauer program and was the first national-magazine treatment of the program by a serious reporter. Wright would later expand his reporting into the book Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (1997). The piece set the language and the framing — “a study you have not heard of, conducted on people who do not know they were studied” — that subsequent writers have largely retained.

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein, working through the early 2000s, produced their own reporting in support of the book Identical Strangers; some of that reporting was placed in adjacent publications around the book’s 2007 release, including a piece in The New York Times. Their work is, by some distance, the most direct subject-voiced journalism the study has produced, and it remains the most substantive single body of original reporting on the program available in print.

Wave three: 2017–present

The release of The Twinning Reaction in 2017 and Three Identical Strangers in 2018 generated a sustained run of post-documentary coverage in the major American outlets — The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, The Washington Post, and others. The strongest pieces in this wave have done two kinds of work: extending the reporting on the institutional position of Yale and the Jewish Board, and following individual subjects who came forward in the years after the documentaries’ release.

Reporting on the partial record-release process that began after 2018 has appeared periodically in subsequent years. This archive maintains an ongoing reading list of post-2018 coverage; readers with citations to add are welcome to send them through the contact channel.

Why this index is partial

Working journalism is not always available in formats friendly to permanent linking. Some local 1980 coverage exists only on microfilm; some 2018-era pieces have been edited or paywalled in ways that change what a citation points at. This page lists the pieces this archive recommends and is gradually building toward a fuller bibliography. It does not, at any given moment, claim completeness. The position of this archive is that the journalism on this subject has done much of the work of keeping the matter publicly legible, and that the appropriate response to its limitations is to add to it rather than to leave a fuller index for some later year.