[citation needed] He is a contributing editor for Harper's, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Rolling Stone.

His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Lapham's Quarterly, Oxford American, Bookforum, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, New York, Advocate, Guernica, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, New Statesman, The Nation, The New Republic, Forward, and The Baffler.

He has taught at New York University and is the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College.

He is the former editor-in-chief of Pakn Treger, a journal published by the National Yiddish Book Center.

[5] Sharlet was an executive producer of the five-part Netflix series The Family (2019), based on his books The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.