He wrote more than 20 cover stories for the United States and international editions of the magazine, largely focusing on the 2003 Iraq War, global terrorism, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
[4][7] Ratnesar won the 2004 National Headliner Award for Magazine Reporting for TIME's 2003 "Person of the Year" story on the American soldier.
He also won New York Press Club awards for feature writing in 2004 and spot news reporting in 2003.
[7] In 2009, he published his first book, Tear Down This Wall: A City, A President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War (Simon & Schuster).
He left his managing position at TIME in 2010 to join the New America Foundation as its Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow.