[1] Beginning in 2007, he worked as an interviewer collecting oral histories for the StoryCorps Project,[2] before becoming a staff writer at The Village Voice in 2009.

[8] In 2014, Thrasher was approached to investigate the story of Michael "Tiger Mandingo" Johnson, a young Black gay man near St. Louis who was HIV-positive had been charged with "recklessly" exposing six sexual partners to the virus, two of whom contracted it.

[19] In 2017, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame for the American Sociological Association's journal Contexts,[20] and in 2019, he was awarded a $75,000 Creativity and Free Expression grant from the Ford Foundation.

[22] As the student speaker at the 2019 convocation ceremony for NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Thrasher expressed support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement "against the apartheid state government in Israel".

[26] Thrasher was briefly suspended with pay from teaching classes while a University committee investigated complaints regarding his journalistic objectivity;[27] he announced via a press release that he had been reinstated in January 2025.

[28] In August 2022, Thrasher published The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide with Celadon Books, an imprint of Macmillan.

The reader sees how and why the narratives develop in particular ways, and feels fury and despair, as well as occasional glimmers of hope.