Investigative Journalist · Magazine Writer
Cover stories for Emmy Magazine. Crime columns for The Atlantic and The Guardian. Lead writer for The New York Times “Styles” section. Investigations that prompted a federal inquiry — and work anthologized in three Best American volumes.
Twenty-plus years reporting on television, crime, technology and American culture — for editors who still believe a story should be able to survive its own fact-check.
Bylines in The New York Times · Emmy Magazine · The Atlantic · The Guardian · Esquire · GQ · New York Magazine · Wired · Los Angeles Magazine · Dateline NBC
The recent center of gravity: cover stories and craft reporting on how television actually gets made — the actors, directors, editors and cinematographers behind the shows everyone is watching.
The making of FX's feudal epic
Inside the most ambitious production on television — a cover story on the craft, scale and gamble behind the series that reset what a period drama could do.
Read the cover story (PDF) →Rage, rendered beautifully
A cover story on Netflix's road-rage fever dream — and a follow-up on Season 2. Two strangers, one parking lot, and the craft that turned fury into prestige TV.
Read the cover story (PDF) →A spy story, told twice
The cover story on HBO's adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer-winning novel — double agents, double identities, and a production that had to hold both.
Read the cover story (PDF) →The tricks-of-the-trade reporting: how the illusion is built, stolen, faked and fixed.
Link note: two pieces from the old site — “Beta Blockers” and “Hacks: A Cut Above” — pointed to broken Dropbox addresses. Both are back: they now link to the pieces' full text on the Television Academy's site. Nothing else was dropped.
The stories with consequences — the ones other journalists, regulators and one federal agency had to answer for.
Millions of people living in the shadow of the Indian Point nuclear plant. The investigation prompted a federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission inquiry — the NRC document is linked here, because the story's original host, HighBeam, shut down years ago and took the old link with it.
Investigative reporting · Read the NRC document (PDF) →A New York Times investigation that later became a Dateline NBC story — the reporting that built Chun's name in New York before the magazine years.
The New York Times → Dateline NBCThe unraveling of the most gifted — and most self-destructive — chess player who ever lived, reported for The Atlantic.
The AtlanticThe SoHo internet-sex caper that landed in The Best American Crime Writing 2003 — character reporting from the web's wild first decade. (Esquire archive, January 1998 issue.)
Details · Best American Crime WritingLong-form reporting on the club-drug underground — Los Angeles Magazine's investigative desk at full stretch.
Los Angeles Magazine · LongformFrom New York Magazine's crime-and-law coverage — plus the magazine's design-issue work that later seeded a second career-long obsession with how things look and why.
New York Magazine · The fashion / design piece →Hitmen who can't shoot. Fraudsters who kill. Thieves in five-star hotels. Crime, reported as a system — not a spectacle.
The Atlantic · The Guardian · 2018 — 2020
Two columns, one preoccupation: crime as it actually works — the economics, the psychology, and the amateurs who keep getting caught. The Atlantic's “Criminal Tendencies” includes the 2018 red-collar crime piece; Audiochuck launched its own Red Collar show two years later.
Nine dispatches on the business of breaking the law.
Six reports on larceny in unlikely places — hotels, spas, embassies and the front seat of an Uber.
The Atlantic's “BIG” dispatches from abroad, the business column, and selected features — surveillance states, coffin clubs, desalination and the sperm donor with 23 kids.
A long second beat: how technology sounds, looks and gets made. Features on Hollywood props and Tesla clones; a famous ear for audio gear; and the design eye that ran from SFMOMA to a Paul Rudolph house. Full Wired archive →
The old site's full inventory — deduplicated, dead ends removed, and searchable. Filter by publication or type a word from the title.
Audit, November 2026: this rebuild started from all 125 links on the previous renechun.com. Removed: the dead HighBeam host (China Syndrome now links to the NRC document), the malformed Daily Beast address (it was prose, not a URL, and no valid address could be recovered), eight invisible duplicate links, and stories listed two or three times under different labels. “Beta Blockers” and “Hacks: A Cut Above,” whose old Dropbox links were also broken, were restored once their full text turned up on the Television Academy's site. The Ketamine Club and Wired links keep their original http addresses where the publisher still serves them that way.
Rene Chun is an investigative journalist with more than twenty years in American magazines. He was lead writer for The New York Times “Styles” section — over a hundred bylines, primarily as a freelancer under Eric Asimov — and a contributing writer on the mastheads of Esquire, GQ, New York Magazine, Wired and Los Angeles Magazine.
His columns gave him two durable beats. For The Atlantic, “Criminal Tendencies” treated crime as an economy — hitmen, pickpockets, prop-money counterfeiters, and the red-collar fraudsters whose schemes turn lethal. For The Guardian, he filed the same curiosity from hotels, embassies and rideshares. Lately the byline lives at Emmy Magazine, where his cover stories — Shōgun, Beef, The Sympathizer — report on television from inside the craft.
The work has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Crime Writing and The Best Business Stories of the Year. He holds a bachelor's in journalism from the University of Iowa, is based in Hastings, New York, works remotely, and can be in Manhattan when a story requires it.
Available for assignments: long-form features, cover stories, columns, and narrative podcast reporting and writing.
Assignments, tips, and speaking inquiries — the fastest route is email.